Stephen Downes

Tim O'Reilly has found another common term to trademark, labeling the emerging trend toward identity-based content navigation 'Who 2.0' (I still prefer my term, the 'Semantic Social Network). O'Reilly writes: "We are just in the early stages, digital identity doesn't really work yet. But that will, you know, start to coalesce, where all these different sources of identity will start to be resolved and connect to each other. And we'll have a rich identity system you could call Who 2.0." [Direct Link]

Very good (though large - 6 meg , and EDUCAUSE isn't the fastest site in the world) slide deck on identity management (I link to the EDUCAUSE HTML page, since there are actually three separate decks to download). If you are into identity at least as much as I am, then this presentation will be worth your while. Note how tangled identity becomes with institutional policies and other tasks, like managing access to resources. Ask yourself whether an identity federation is a sustainable model for ... [Direct Link]

I followed what turned out to be a pretty uninformative link on a new Blackboard community product and ended up at this page - a summary of stories about Blackboard carried by a local Washington D.C. publication. I can't really explain the results ordering (what's so hard about ORDER BY crdate DESC?). The product? Well, I found the Blackboard press release on the new K-12 starter edition, but it wasn't really that informative either. [Direct Link]

This is a good article. It captures my own discontent with social networking sites (concerns I have expressed, say, in Public Spaces, Private Places and The Semantic Social Network). The author writes, "The model for the new web economy seems to be to run a single, centralised service that acts as a carrier for advertising... Result: "new" media is subject to the same business interests as the old media. This is a mistake." Ad-driven sites, whether content or application driven, depend on ... [Direct Link]