Equals Drummond

Your Own Personal Piece of the Cloud

Posted on 1/17/2010 by Drummond Reed

There’s an excellent thread going on among the MyDex team about the accelerating shift towards cloud computing and what this means for the individual. I strongly recommended to them Nicolas Carr’s The Big Switch for a discussion of this very subject.

Arguably, we as individuals need the cloud even more than companies do. On the whole, we have less ability to maintain our own “individual piece of the cloud” than a company does. We have neither the capital, the expertise, nor the ability to persist across major changes (all but the very smallest company can persist when an employee leaves or dies, but when an individual person dies, their world of information disintegrates very quickly).

Google and other cloud-based service providers have recognized this. Given the proper safeguards* (see huge asterisk below), the advantages to individuals maintaining their personal data store of all their personal data assets at one or more cloud service providers are enormous. The latest example: watch the migration taking place from Intuit’s venerable Quicken franchise of desktop personal money management to the cloud-based equivalent at Mint.com.

Mint.com’s advantages are so compelling – all your data is automatically backed up, automatically accessible from any Web-connected device, automatically updated from any of your (supported) financial accounts, automatically able to send you important alerts and reminders – that it makes desktop money management look as antiquated as 5-1/4 inch floppy disks. (Remember, there was a time when 5-1/4 inch floppy disks were manna from heaven.)

If you need any further proof of this paradigm shift, Mint.com was acquired by Intuit last September.

I think we’ve seen only the very start of this paradigm shift of migration of personal data and personal data services to the cloud. And I don’t believe it will be take than a year or two until it becomes the norm. Check back here in January 2012 and let’s see where we are.

*HUGE ASTERISK: I don’t mean for one second to gloss over the topic of the safety (umbrella term for security, privacy, and control) of personal data in the cloud. I spend a good part of my day job as Executive Director of the Information Card Foundation on this topic, and it is the entire premise of emerging VRM service providers like MyDex. It is so deep and rich of a topic that I believe before long it will result in a whole new branch of the law.

Posted in Data Portability, Personal Data Store, VRM | 1 Comment

VRM Rising

Posted on 1/6/2010 by Drummond Reed

I recommend Doc’s new post that explains the essence of what’s behind VRM. It’s a big vision, his, but Doc has a way of framing the future that makes it look inevitable – all that remains is the question of “how close is it in the mirror”?

I’m betting that this object is closer than it appears.

Posted in Personal Data Store, VRM, XDI | Leave a comment

Will Norris on Identity and (Non-Recyclable) Identifiers

Posted on 1/5/2010 by Drummond Reed

I could spend this entire week doing nothing but reading and posting about good post-holiday reading of recent blog posts. My theory is simple: over the holiday break, people (well, most people – not me this year) have time to take a breather and write down something that’s really been on their minds.

And because they are not rushed, they have time to condense and sharpen their thoughts, and the result is a rash of excellent blog posts.

A wonderful example is Will Norris’ post about identity and identifiers. He speaks from long experience (and he’s worked on several identity protocols, including OpenID and SAML, as part of the Shibboleth project).

Read it and weep (if you have a recyclable OpenID).

(Aside: Although, as Will’s article intimates, XRI architecture solves this problem at the structural level, the implementation of XRI across OpenID 2.0 sites and libraries is currently very uneven. So IMHO realistically a full solution to the recyclable identifier problem with OpenID is still another protocol generation away.)

Posted in OpenID, Practical I-Names, XRI | Leave a comment

Personal Data Stores – The Time is Coming

Posted on 12/28/2009 by Drummond Reed

This entire fall has been intense with work, thus the paucity of posts here. The holidays brings a welcome respite and a chance to catch up with a few key mental threads.

One of them is the growing awareness of the need for what the VRM community calls personal data stores (PDS). The concept is relatively simple: an online store for your own personal data — anything from classic PII (personally identifiable information), such as your identity and contact data, to any other data that you generate or control (files, blog posts, pictures, papers, music, videos, etc.)

Three things have surprised me about PDS:

How generally accepted the notion is by almost anyone who spends much time online, even folks well outside the identity community. It’s a relatively intuitive idea as soon as you understand the basic premise that individual people should have their own data source online.
How many names have been applied to the same general concept. As I indicated, PDS is only the term applied by the VRM community. The same general concept has been called probably a dozen other names. Here’s an excellent blog post by Mark Dixon that calls it a Personal Identity-Persona Service and a Security Identity Bank Vault.
How hard it is to implement. Though there have been several attempts, such as the Mine! Project, nothing has come remotely close to catching on yet.

I have several theses as to why this is so (and yes, the need for a Internet data sharing standard like XDI is high on the list), but I’ll save those for another blog post.

Here, I’ll just conclude with a simple prediction: it’s a threshold problem. Once the first practical solution for PDS starts to take hold, it will catch on and grow just like the first social networks did. The only question is what application will provide that initial traction.

Posted in Data Portability, Dataweb, Personal Data Store, R-Cards, Relationship cards, Social Web, VRM, XDI | 4 Comments

Bob Blakley Gets Privacy Right

Posted on 10/5/2009 by Drummond Reed

I don’t know why — maybe it’s just the fall weather — but the privacy temperature is changing. We’re in a period of global warming towards privacy as a key component of Internet identity infrastructure. Part of it is my work at the Information Card Foundation on the Open Trust Framework (read this white paper if you haven’t seen it yet). I’ll be blogging more about that soon.

But another sign is this superb post by Bob Blakley on what’s at the heart of privacy and privacy protection. As one of the technologists that’s spent a decade working on technological solutions to privacy, I can’t endorse Bob’s conclusions strongly enough. It’s a social problem, one that technology can only help create the social cues and custodianship to help with.

But read Bob’s post to see how well he frames the problem and what technologists can and can’t do to help.

Posted in Privacy | Tagged Bob Blakley, ICF, Open Trust Framework | Leave a comment

Sincerely, John Hughes

Posted on 8/8/2009 by Drummond Reed

Someday I’ll tell the rest of the story about why I’m posting the following link. But for right now, let me just recommend you read it.

I was never particularly close to John Hughes movies — though I did like The Breakfast Club — but that’s not the point of this story. It’s a story about John Hughes as a person, and the difference it made in one girl’s life.

After I read it — and almost started crying myself — I noticed it has a whooping 1151 comments.

Read it and you’ll know why.

We’ll Know When We Get There: Sincerely, John Hughes

Posted in General | 2 Comments

The Permissioned Web: Open Does Not Mean Public Domain

Posted on 5/13/2009 by Drummond Reed

At the Glue Conference this week I’m enjoying a great set of speakers lined up by Eric Norlin on the topic of how everything in the networked universe gets glued together using Web 2.0 tools and beyond. (The talk Mitch Kapor gave this morning was worth the trip all by itself.)

In a few minutes I’ll be on a panel called Implementing the Open Web. In chatting with Lloyd Hilaiel of Yahoo, Kevin Mullins of MIT, and Phil Windley of Kynetx about this topic last night, we hit on one key point that Phil articulated this way: “People tend to conflate ‘open’ with ‘public domain’, i.e., that anything that qualifies as open must be freely available to all.”

It struck me how true this is. It reminds me of the Richard Stallman quote describing open source (cited in the Wikipedia Gratis versus Libre article): “Think free as in free speech, not free beer.”

In terms of data on the Open Web, what this means that even though a particular pool of data may be available via an open standard, publicly-accessible interface, it does NOT mean this data must be publicly available to anyone. If that were true, the whole concept of a personal data store — a key premise of VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) — would not be possible.

So what makes any system or node participating in the Web “open” is not that its data is public, but that the metadata and services for accessing it are available via a publicly discoverable, open-standard interface. The public discovery portion of this is the goal of the XRD work now underway at the XRI Technical Committee at OASIS (based on the original XRDS work – see this blog post by Eran Hammer-Lahav of Yahoo to understand the differences). The open standard portion is the output of IETF, W3C, OASIS, and all the other SSOs (standards-setting organizations) for the net. (The potential of the Open Web Foundation, once it finishes its bootstrap stage, is to make this process of creating open standards even more lightweight and distributed.)

This combination – open discovery of open interfaces accessible over open protocols – is the DNA of the Open Web. And it applies equally to both public and private data. In fact it can finally open up what might be called the Permissioned Web – the Web of all all data that any one party has permission from other parties to access.

That would lead us to the need for integrating identity and permissions with the data, which brings us to the motivations for XDI as a semantic data sharing format/protocol – but my panel is about to start so that will have to be another post.

Posted in Data Portability, Dataweb, Social Web, VRM, XDI, XRD, XRDS | Tagged Open Web, Permissioned Web | Leave a comment

Star Trek: See It

Posted on 5/7/2009 by Drummond Reed

One advantage of having a 13-year old son is that you have an excuse to go see a summer blockbuster movie on the very first night it comes out.

I never did that as a kid, which is one reason I let my son (and his biggest ally in such guilty pleasures, my wife) talk me into it.

And boy, was it worth it. I love films, especially world class dramas, but there’s something extra special about a Hollywood popular movie that somehow turns fun into its own high art. The first Pirates of the Caribbean, the original Spiderman film (and to a lesser extent the third), and last summer’s Dark Knight all fit this bill.

Now you can add this Star Trek. Where exactly they found the energy, humor, and drive in this film I have no idea. How it plays gently, lovingly, and brilliantly off the original while at the same time channelling its own unique spirit and energy still has me doing a mental whistle each time I think about it.

This one will be a good old-fashion b-l-o-c-k-b-u-s-t-e-r at the box office. But don’t go see it for that reason. Go because it will make you happy that so many generations can enjoy a story for so many generations.

Posted in General, Movies | 1 Comment

Eric Norlin on Conferences Vs. Trade Shows

Posted on 4/29/2009 by Drummond Reed

Having just been to RSA, which is the essence of a trade show, and being about to go to Gluecon, which I’m hoping will be the essence of a conference, I find the distinction between conferences and trade shows that Eric makes in this blog post very useful.

Of course, the most conferency conference is an unconference like the Internet Identity Workshop. If you’ve never been to an unconference like this, you MUST try it. (Warning: you’ll never want to go back.)

Posted in General | Tagged Eric Norlin, Gluecon, RSA, unconference | 1 Comment

Adding another Hat

Posted on 3/16/2009 by Drummond Reed

When I told a friend that I was “adding yet another hat” by taking on the Interim Executive Director role at the Information Card Foundation, he said I had so many hats it reminded him of this children’s book. I haven’t read it (and probably won’t — my kids are into Da Vinci Code and Ender’s Game now).

Quite a few of those hats came from helping start non-profits in the Internet identity industry. However this is the first time I’ve stepped into the E.D. role, and all those hats are part of the reason. I really do feel it’s time to move the industry towards convergence. I believe a selector-based identity model can get us there, and I’ll be reaching out to all the communities I’ve been part of — and others I haven’t yet been part of — to help get us there.

Look for lots of new things coming out of the ICF in the next few months.

Posted in I-Cards, Information cards, R-Cards, Relationship cards | Tagged Information Card Foundation | 3 Comments

Few niggling UI shortcomings of the iPhone

Posted on 3/10/2009 by Drummond Reed

Yes, I am now among the ecstatic legions with an iPhone – if my Samsung had not managed to last so long I would have jumped long ago. And now I’m as happy as all those other souls.

After 10 days of use, though, I have noticed a few small but surprising shortcomings in the otherwise killer UI:

No cut-and-paste of text. Given that this is the best-known shortcoming, I can’t believe it hasn’t been addressed yet.
No ability to highlight text and then delete it. You can only backspace it out. Really limits text editing.
No reordering of information for a contact. Phone numbers (work, home, mobile) not only appear in random order after a sync with Outlook (apparently a sync issue), but there’s no way to reorder them (drag and drop does not work). What would fix both problems is the ability to set a default order for contact info and have every contact use it, so it’s consistent throughout. I just dialed someone’s fax number because it was the first on the list, where I expected their mobile to be.
No ability to see the exact number of a recent incoming call. Given that this was the only option my old Samsung offered (it wouldn’t show the contact name on the received calls list), I was very surprised to find out that the iPhone does the opposite: it lists the contact name, but not the number. So if the contact has a landline and a mobile, you can’t find out which one they just tried you on – you just have to guess. (Update 2009-03-11: I learned via a comment that the iPhone does highlight the number the contact used on the page displayed when you click the blue arrow next to the name on the recent calls list. However on some iPhones this highlight is red, whereas on mine it is blue, which was too subtle for me to notice and understand what it meant. I’d like the ability to control this highlight color in preferences.)
No ability to edit a contact off the recent calls list. Especially when you are first using a phone, you want to be able to add contact info for a call you just received. You can do this if the caller is not in your contact list yet. But if the caller IS already in your contact list…no dice. You are forced to switch to the Contacts app and look up the contact again there. Not intuitive at all (but, like cut-and-paste, probably has to do with apps not being able to talk to one another?)

’nuff said. Doesn’t make me rave about the iPhone any less. Just makes me want perfection to be even more perfect.

Posted in iPhone | 7 Comments

Here comes the next Internet Identity Workshop

Posted on 3/9/2009 by Drummond Reed

Spring is around the corner and that means IIW. The next one is May 18-20 in the standard location: the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

Early registration is particularly important this year – 75 registrations are needed by the end of March to secure the space.

This continues to be, year after year, where Internet identity happens. If you have to pick only one identity event to attend, this is it.

See you there.

Posted in General, Identity Commons | Tagged IIW, Internet Identity Workshop | Leave a comment

Paul Trevithick on Password Cards

Posted on 3/4/2009 by Drummond Reed

Paul’s done a post about his writeup of password cards on the Higgins wiki. IMHO this is a long overdue idea for how an identity client (“selector” in information card terms) can overcome the chicken-and-egg adoption problem.

Selectors are like browsers – the more of them people start using, the more sites become card-enabled. It won’t work the other way around. So the trick is issuing i-cards that provide real end-user value before sites start issuing them for login, cross-domain claims transfer, etc.

More about that soon.

Posted in Higgins, I-Cards, Information cards | Tagged I-Cards, password cards, Paul Trevithick | Leave a comment

FollowFriday Microtagging with XRIs

Posted on 3/4/2009 by Drummond Reed

The Craig Burton is at it again. Putting together all kinds of cool memes. This time he’s seen how to splice XRI into the FollowFriday endorsement system for Twitter. He calls the concept “microtagging” – using XRIs in the tag space (+plumber, +doctor, +analyst, etc.) to categorize FollowFriday endorsements for aggregation on Scott Lemon’s TopFollowFriday aggregator.

Blows my mind. Who ever thought the structured semantic web would start evolving on Twitter?? But that’s just how this organic Internet thing happens…

Posted in Blogging, Microtagging, Reputation, XRI | Leave a comment

Sensemaking Series on Internet Identity

Posted on 2/28/2009 by Drummond Reed

If you need to understand Internet identity quickly and at a deeper level than you can glean from blog posts and trade journals, but don’t want to hire a dedicated consultant, Eugene Kim’s Blue Oxen Associates has a great answer: his Sensemaking Series is doing a series on Internet Identity. The series expert is my former XRI TC co-chair Gabe Wachob, who I can recommend hands down as knowing the space cold. Better yet, Gabe is famous for never hyping anything — he calls it just the way he sees it.

Plus the format – a set of four 90-minute sessions with a limit of five session attendees plus the expert – maximizes the information/effort ratio.

It’s a great design from two of the best people I know in the industry.

Posted in General | Tagged Blue Oxen, Eugene Kim, Gabe Wachob | 1 Comment

Bob Blakley's Relationship Layer Paper Now Freely Available

Posted on 2/12/2009 by Drummond Reed

I made a long post about it when Bob first presented it at IIW and then the Burton Catalyst conference last June. Now anyone can get it here. See also Bob’s commentary on its evolution here.

Highly recommended for understanding the underlying dynamics of identity and relationship on the net.

Posted in Blogging, General, R-Cards, Relationship cards | Tagged Bob Blakley, Burton Group | 2 Comments

Kynetx: Rules Rule

Posted on 2/9/2009 by Drummond Reed

More about the long quiet spell soon. First I must post about a trip I made last week to spend the day with Phil Windley, his partner Stephen Fulling, and the inimitable Craig Burton down in Salt Lake City.

What Phil and company are doing at Kynetx is earthshaking. There’s not much info on the website yet, but last week Phil posted a white paper The Advent of Next Generation Browsing that introduces the whole concept of structured browsing. I won’t even bother to try to explain it here; just get the paper and read it. Then read another one of Joe Andrieu’s exceedingly cogent essays with his impressions, criticisms, and suggestions about the Kynetx vision of structured browsing and how it fits with Joe’s work on search maps. Also read Phil’s reply to Joe.

The rules language Phil wrote (KRL – Kynetx Rules Language) is at the heart of their solution for structured browsing. I am a huge fan of what rules languages can do with structured identifiers and structured information. That’s what I was down in Salt Lake talking with Phil, Stephen, and Craig about. Phil followed it up with a great post, First Class Namespaces in Programming Languages, that sums up how XRI and XDI might fit with KRL.

Did I say earthshaking? Watch out when this quake breaks loose.

Posted in Information cards, Relationship cards, Rules, VRM, XDI, XRI | Tagged kynetx phil-windley craig-burton, structured-browsing | Leave a comment

Eran's Status Report on Discovery

Posted on 12/5/2008 by Drummond Reed

Something else so good I just have to blog it: Eran Hammer-Lahav‘s Discovery Coordination Report on the new metadata-discovery list he set up. Eran’s turning into a one-man hub of all things discovery as he drives forward together with the rest of the OASIS XRI TC towards the pushing out the new XRD 1.0 spec.

I have high hopes for this spec and Eran is one of the key reasons (plus the efforts of his co-editor Nat Sakimura of NRI, who is working OpenID miracles in Japan, and other new TC members who have joined to finally make simple, safe, uniform metadata discovery a reality on the Web).

Posted in General, XRD, XRDS, XRI, Yadis | Tagged Discovery, Eran Hammer-Lahav, Nat Sakimura, XRD, XRI | Leave a comment

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