6 March, 2006 - 3:33pm

The three speakers this evening discussed issues that we believe will not succeed unless there's a user-centric Identity 2.0 Web. The issues ranged from Attenuation, to the Architecture of Participation, to the Internet of Things. To reach their full potential all of these require (in Bruce Sterling's words) digital identities that must be uniquely identifiable, and (in our opinion) also under the control of the user.

Indicative of this, Rael Dornfest said that we are being inundated with data our every waking moment and although all this data aggregation has great promise, it hasn’t come far along. You’re just shifting information from one place to another. The problem is there’s no attenuation amongst what you should read, with aggregation, you just have more and more data. Attenuation will allow you to find things more like what you actually like.

Tim O’Reilly started with an overview of Web 2.0, stating that companies in this space are harnessing collective intelligence and the key to their competitive advantage is that the users create the value. He gave an interesting analogy of the "Mechanical Turk" in comparing the main differences between Internet applications before and now, whereby it's the people that come inside the machine or Internet application that are key. He believes it’s the implicit use of people which is what’s interesting i.e. if you’re a flickr user, you are a component of flickr. He suggested user empowerment is going to the next level with bionic software, and made a retro reference to the “six million dollar man”, with software increasingly becoming the architecture of participation.

Renowned science fiction author Bruce Sterling discussed the future of the Internet of Things, which he predicts is about 30 years out. He believes that current on-demand social applications are able to change the physical world because they are out in the world with us -- researching, linking, tracking, ranking and sorting. And that with the Internet of Things in the future everything will have a unique digital identity whereby:

• objects will be tagged with RFID
• geotracking will make the objects uniquely identifiable
• powerful search engines will enable us to look for the objects

He suggests that if objects in the future have all of these properties they would be trackable in space and time. A down to earth and amusing example he gave was that in the morning he’d no longer need to hunt for his shoes, he’d just google them. See his book Shaping Things for an articulate examination of the topic.