Identity web as hologram

A metaphor that I like to use for the identity web is that of a hologram. Just like when you shatter a hologram, each piece reflects cloudy images of the whole original, the identity web promises to embody an ever-greater proportion of the web’s knowledge in each of its nodes—which, in principal, would come to obviate the need for a location-based discovery and navigation metaphor for the web.

I am brought to mind of those multi-dimensional tangles of superstrings that physicists tell us may be coiled up within each of the tiniest spaces of our universe. Perhaps that is our challenge in evolving an identity web—to roll up the web into a billion locations, thereby making the very concept of information “location” redundant?

And yet, each node also defines what it is not by its differences from the whole. The piece of the hologram embodies the whole within the unique context of its identity.

[This post was inspired by a blog conversation with Kermit Snelson—thanks, Kermit!]