Blog Friends

I came up with the name "Blog Friends" for the service for bloggers I'm creating.

Without giving away the killer details yet, let me just say that Blog Friends will make finding and sharing great blog posts and growing your readership a more sociable experience.

Our strapline? "Blogging just got friendlier." : )

Here's our concept for the logo:



Like it?

weaverluke—now also on Facebook!

So I followed the stampeding herd and set up a weaverluke outpost on Facebook. If we aren't "friends" there already, please do stop by and friend me. : )

What's Google trying to say about me?!

I note from a perusal of my MyBlogLog referrer logs (the web addresses that site visitors surf from) that weaverluke blog is currently the top result for the Google search on "kolkata prostitute phone number".

Honoured, I'm sure, Mr Google!

I heart London Olympic logo

I like the London Olympic logo! And so does this guy, rather articulately.

After all, being British has never been about fitting in. : )

Rolling up my sleeves!

It has been a really rewarding experience to blog daily over these last few months. I have certainly deepened my understanding and love of identity in the process, even though it has been an arduous one at times. Mostly, it's just been a lot of fun to shoot off opinions on pretty much any subject that catches my fancy in the name of "identity"! ; )

However, I've come to sense that my focus is now required on a number of larger scale endeavours—a shift from short story to novel form, you might say. Three projects are starting to fill my horizons:

1. My forthcoming collaborative post series on "Startups and identity". I am enjoying some exhilarating brainstorming sessions with my co-conspiritors at the moment, and I need to give these substantial individual posts—and the overall project—some quality thinking and writing time. My poor brain is straining at its limits with this stuff!
   
2. My own startup, a service for pro bloggers. I recently met someone with great experience and knowhow, and who I clicked with really well, who could just help me get this project off the ground big time, after months and years of planning and effort. I think it's time to jump in feet first!
   
3. Identity Society, the research and discussion forum I co-founded. This autumn, the DTI is offering £10 million pounds for research into the impacts of Identity Management (the ID Card etc.) on society, and I believe there is a great opportunity for Identity Society here. Having left this project out to graze somewhat since our launch event, I am now working with co-founder John Madelin and a number of other leading figures in the identity world to take it forwards much more proactively.
   

So, the upshot of all this is that, even when I'm not teaching piano, my working day is going to be fairly comprehensively accounted for by these three projects. Accordingly, the frequency of my blog posts is likely to fall quite a bit for the time being.

Please don't quit on me, though—I'm really excited about the "Startups and identity" project, and you will hopefully find those posts appearing not too infrequently on these virtual pages!

Here's to new adventures... : )

Identity and startups: an introduction

Why is understanding identity important for startups?

What strategic relevance does identity have for technology startups? The answer, in a nutshell, is that understanding and catering for people's experience of identity—individuals' unique experience of who or what they, other people, things and information are—seems to be key to understanding how to create and monetise value in our increasingly fluid and personalisable society.

People are coming to expect to be able to customise and integrate more and more areas of their life in their own, individually unique way. To be competitive, startups must work out how to enable that customisation and integration in a way that is radically more effective than their competition. And more often than not, innovations in technology and its applications provide that opportunity.

The problem—a complex topic covered in an inconsistent and piecemeal way

Sounds simple, doesn't it? Just work out how your target users experience identity and build your service accordingly.

However, there's a catch: identity, even in its practical, applied (as opposed to abstractly philosophical) sense, turns out to be a hugely complex and multi-faceted subject, spanning psychology, economics, branding, business theory, law, politics, anthropology and many other fields. You simply cannot reduce identity to any one of these perspectives if you hope to understand it clearly, because identity is something that informs our whole life! Yet while there already exists a good deal of research on and discussion of each niche area of identity studies—much of it of great merit in its own terms—there has been little work done on developing cross-sector approaches to understanding identity.

Where is the poor entrepreneur to start?

The solution—an integrated conceptual framework for startups and identity

What seems to be needed is a clear, comprehensive and integrated conceptual framework within which startups can plan their identity strategy. Such a framework would enable startups to identify opportunities, threats and unknowns that identity represents for their business across commercial, technological, legal and social spheres—in a straightforward and consistent way.

In a forthcoming series of posts over the coming weeks and months, myself and a number of co-authors, each a thought leader in their specialist field, will develop just such an overarching conceptual framework for startups and identity.

We will begin by looking at the opportunities, threats and unknown factors around identity that digital networks—with a special focus on the web—raise for startups. Subsequent posts will go on to explore mobile, governmental, legal, branding, retail, banking, mainstream media and psychosocial aspects of the problem space. Links to each post will appear below as they are published.

I'm looking forward to learning a lot in the process of co-authoring these posts—I hope you will accompany me and my collaborators on the journey, and help us along the way with your comments and criticisms!

Would you pay for your "own" personalised information?

Can you imagine a future where we pay retailers to provide us with copies of the personalised information we generate as we shop (our favourite products and brands, regular purchases and so on), so we can use it to personalise our shopping experience across all the retailers we engage with?

Once you get beyond the moral certainties of information "ownership" in these grey areas of consumer-brand interaction, that kind of business model suddenly looks a whole lot more plausible.

Flooding the personal information market

Glyn Moody on the benefits of enabling supersurveillance through radical openness:

Hm, a novel approach:

So it dawned on him: If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? "I've discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away," he says, grinning as he sips his venti Black Eye. Elahi relishes upending the received wisdom about surveillance. The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately. Plus, no ambitious agent is going to score a big intelligence triumph by snooping into your movements when there's a Web page broadcasting the Big Mac you ate four minutes ago in Boise, Idaho. "It's economics," he says. "I flood the market."

Not only effective, but fun, by the sounds of it!

FOI automation—a distant pipedream

Andrew at IMPACT blog points us to this press release from the Information Commissioner's Office (my bold):

Freedom of Information is fast becoming a fixed feature of 21st century democracy and should not be seen as a battle ground between public bodies and the people, according to the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas. Speaking at the annual FOI Live conference in London on 24 May, the Information Commissioner [stated] that the transparency and accountability brought by Freedom of Information reinforce good government, and should not be seen as a threat. However, he will also stress that those using FOI must act responsibly.

Readers will know that I believe that the trend towards information transparency is ineluctable, so I quite agree with the Information Commissioner on that point.

But what of the misuse of the FOI that his last sentence touches on? Of course, if search technologies could step up to automate the resolution of FOI requests properly (which it falls so far short of doing right now), the problem of human resources in government and business being stretched by nuisance FOI requests would disappear.

However, to achieve such automation, we would need to develop search technologies that can mediate the individual, richly-structured, socially and semantically contextualised ways people think and express themselves. And even Google is light years away from achieving that goal.

In the meantime, it is hard to see how government and business—and indeed the legal system—can avoid the overhead of having human beings sort through FOI requests written in natural language in order to make judgement calls over the validity of those requests.

Bob Blakley on Real ID

Writing in response to the DHS’ Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee report on the implementation of the REAL ID Act, Bob Blakley summarises its message in plain language:

The REAL ID act is a bad idea. The problems with the REAL ID act listed in the Committee’s report should not be fixed, because fixing them will not address the core issues the REAL ID act raises. Fixing the problems the Committee has identified will simply produce the best possible version of a very bad system. If the REAL ID act is implemented, there is no chance it will meet its stated goals; there is every reason to believe it will have many unforeseen adverse consquences; and there is every reason to believe its costs will be huge in proportion to its benefits.

I wonder if the US government will listen to its thoughtful critics here as the UK government really has not to date (although there are signs that that may be beginning to change...)?

London Lite finds a fan

Overheard on a bustling, rush-hour street near Victoria Station yesterday:

"London Lite*?"

"Thanks, I'll take two."

TWO?!

*London Lite is one of three free London papers that hordes of enthusiastic vendors brandish under your nose from every angle as you attempt to navigate the metropolis's pavements.

Nuanced relationship and Facebook

Michael Arrington writes:

When you confirm a friend on facebook, you are asked to state how you know the person. But the options are simply too narrow. “We hooked up” is rarely an appropriate way to describe someone you know through blogging, networking, etc. In fact, most of the options are not really useful for the millions of non-college student adults flooding into the service. It’s time to add more options.

The underlying problem here is that we all think about and express the nature of our relationships in different ways, but computer systems aren't yet very good at inferring similarities between these different descriptions. Which is why they straightjacket us into using a few, standardised descriptions, rather than allowing us to make up our own.

Roll on natural language research for the inspiration of better data integration system design! Until we progress in that area, I suspect these kind of data standardisation issues will remain rather intractable.

weaverluke blog is 3 today!

Happy birthday, weaverluke blog—I can't quite believe it, but it has indeed been three years today since I posted my first entry about an itinerant Native American spiritual leader called Walking Eagle!

I never did hear from Walking Eagle again—I wonder how he's getting along on his globe-trotting travels? I have certainly learned a whole lot about myself, identity and life in general on my own three year blogging journey.

What will the next three years bring for weaverluke blog, I wonder? I hope that you'll tarry along the winding path with me to find out—and help me avoid some wrong turns along the way, I'm sure!

Privacy, lost and found

photo by weaverluke

What are the chances of an identity nut like me stumbling upon this on an Islington pavement?!

With the exposure of their personal crib note into the public domain, I guess the author has lost a tiny fragment of their (arguable) human right. Ah well, nothing like the University of Life to bring dry academic lessons home! (Although did the note's author really care one jot about the loss, I wonder? Was the note even deliberately discarded after an exam? Perhaps that is the lesson—notions of privacy and the personal only matter to us personally when we feel we have something precious to shield from others?)