Posted by Mike Bijon April 24, 2006
Terrell Russell commented on my earlier ID/trust post in “Can claimID provide credibility?” and a commenter there, Fred Stutzman, pointed out some great info about how trust can be built on a foundation of untrusted URL’s, as well as pointing out several ID protocols in the making: OpenID, LID, and microID.
From my comment at claimID: I think I came down harder on claimID than I meant to in my prior comment about trust and claimID. Their concept and timing is great and should offer an improvement over the current methods of validating ID’s. As far as I can tell the market is currently monopolized by the closed-system of each of the credit reporting agencies. And they certainly aren’t interested in trust or relationships (or even security, it seems) at all. It’s best we take it out of the hands of those agencies and don’t depend on eBay or MySpace to open their systems either. ClaimID is a good start toward opening things up and giving contrl back to the users, even without a working system up. I just hope Terrell and his team at claimID make the system play nice with others - thus, my continued shouting about needing a protocol or open standard so that the “complex network” described by Terrell will stay up regardless of funding, bandwidth, or any commercial players (made apparent by how hard it is just to keep proprietary soap dispensers full).
Fred (comment at claimID blog), you’re completely right about Cote’s description of the identity management process. He’s got it right and the parties he mentions at OpenID, LID, and microID are already well into implementation. Indeed, all of those systems (after a quick glance) should work well - so long as the primary users are geeky enough to own their own URL’s/hosting accounts. However, once a service is offered to freely host ID URL’s those URL’s won’t confirm anything more than having a Hotmail address does now - and in my mailbox a Hotmail URL is more likely to be spam than someone I trust. That, of course, is why closed trust systems like eBay’s are shallow but still worth something. So, we either need to restrict digital identities to a subset of people willing and able to pay for the URL/priviledge or to build in some sort of feedback loop that adds a level of trust to each identifying domain - thus motivating those hosting ID URL’s for free to keep spam registrations low or face migration away from their untrusted systems.
Posted by Mike Bijon April 19, 2006
The Boston Globe article “Blogs ‘essential’ to a good career“ makes some excellent points about why spending time writing web “articles” and “commentary” is worth far more than some small amount of income from running AdSense advertising. Nonetheless, I have to disagree with their main points, as already summarized by Tom Raferty’s “‘Gis a job!”:
- Blogging creates a network
- Blogs set you up as an expert in your field
- Blogs give you a leg up when you meet someone new
These primary points are accurate, but take little account of: a) most job-seekers don’t promote themselves well/professionally in their resumes (…won’t “personal” blogs end up even less professional?); and b) most employers aren’t actively seeking candidates on the “open” web. Nonetheless, Tom Raferty appears to be both bright and relatively professional based on my readings of his blog - but he’s still not getting any job offers from that exposure. To tell the truth, he would have been a great candidate for a position as a director of IT that I was just working with a client to help fill. If not for the fact that Tom lives in Ireland and the position is in Los Angeles, I still probably wouldn’t have contacted him because I neither had his feed on my reading list nor did I know he was looking for a job. Truth be told, my client and I didn’t put in enough time to search to blogosphere well.
Most jobs are filled with willing employees and aren’t worth spending that job’s entire annual salary just to find and entice “one” perfect candidate. Where should we have started anyway? Most good bloggers are intelligent and discuss a variety of topics, mkaing it even harder to narrow down the search to “the one”. The blogosphere is a big, messy community and even blogger profiles on Technorati (the first place I would have looked) are poor replacements for a resume sent in by an interested candidate. Had I even considered seeking bloggers for that recent employee search, cold-emailing bloggers to see if they’re interested in a certain job - without an accurate measure of the bloggers’ employment desires or location/relocation plans - would just be a waste of time for any job not paying in the top 2%. And, if a job is paying in the top 2% of all jobs out there - then it stands to reason that there are just two or three A-list bloggers who are worth making egregious offers to.
(Blogger/skill directory anyone?)
Update, 4/20/2006: It looks like someone is already working on a system that could be as extensible enough to provide a skills directory, and more, at ClaimID (found via Cloudalicious, from a search on tagging statistics). ClaimID is the first resource I’ve seen for aggregating and annotating information about someone (although without a way to verify the identities on ClaimID there’s still a question as to the authenticity of the data there). ClaimID should prove useful if people actually adopt it. Personally I think ClaimID and sites like it will just lead to “web tool” overload and prefer the idea of an open protocol for sending/receiving identity or trust info - so that everything can be integrated into whatever tools (Outlook, GMail, Wordpress, etc.) or web sites that I do choose to use.
Mike Bijon: I'm a development manager and technologist for a smart, small marketing strategy company, 
