I was asked that question today, and gave the standard answer along the lines of "we don’t want everybody to correlate all information about us all across the web, e.g. the employer with the direct marketers with the healthcare provider". I got an unusual response, however, which was: Couldn’t this be solved as well with…

Another indication that Yadis/LID/OpenID is taking off: today, rss-extensions.org, one of the wikis that we run at NetMesh, was defaced with spam by a user who authenticated himself through OpenID. For eternity, let it be know that it was http://oriflame1.livejournal.com/; his "contribution" involved the usual assortment of drugs (mostly), sex and ringtones. I think we’ve…

Openness can have unexpected results. In case of Yadis, we were hoping that its openness would attract techies to innovate around simple, light-weight, URL-based identity. (And we have.) But here is one innovation we didn’t expect at all: a Yadis Song that somebody wrote up on the Yadis Wiki. But the openness does not end…

What if everybody’s digital identity technologies would seamlessly interoperate with everybody else’s? What if many people could come up with new ideas and protocols, and everybody could build on top of each other’s work without either having to ask for permission, or having to re-invent the wheel? The recent release of the Yadis 1.0 specification…

It’s about time I did this … Let’s start with Wikipedia’s definition of reputation: Reputation is the general opinion (more technically, a social evaluation) of the public toward a person, a group of people, or an organization. Following the link towards social evaluation, we learn: The evaluation of an entity x is "a belief of…