Posted 1:52 PM (0) comments

Do as I say, not as I do

Doc Searls has a very long (for him) blog entry today talking about the tempest in a teapot that has been raised about some ads on the various O'Reilly network web sites. There's been a great hoo-ha about it, and Doc comes down squarely on the side of those who feel that "advertising" which appears to be solely about gaming Google's PageRank system will be the death of the internet. I'm afraid I don't see the problem. I've got to agree with Shelley Powers when she asks:

Who is gaming who?
So if you’re all really concerned about ‘gaming’ Google, then you might want to consider getting rid of your blogrolls. Oh, and you should probably get rid of links in comments. And don’t forget to link to other folks, regardless of pagerank. By the way, don’t link Technorati tags anymore. And you need to stop with the Deli.cio.us sidebar links, too. And while we’re at it…

Too often we treat the general public as if they were bumptious, bucolic rubes who need to be protected from themselves. That's not really the case, though. We may not like the choices they make (and I certainly don't) but they do make them on their own.

Doc, by the way, coupled this diatribe with a fulmination about newspaper sites looking to charge to view their archives. He probably doesn't like having to register with them to view the current news, either. So why am I forced to register in order to leave a comment on your blog? Maybe just another double standard?

Posted 9:09 AM (2) comments

Have I reached the party to whom I'm speaking?

"Presence" - sort of an electronic in/out board - is being bruited about in identity discussion circles fairly heavily these days. Some (mostly in the instant messaging community or the telephone service providers) see presence as an alternative to - or a definition of - identity. Richard Grigonis, in an article in VON magazine last January talks about new initiatives to tie together presence data from various service providers, and it certainly is interesting. But presence is really only a small part of location - the "where" in the context of identity (who, what, when where, how and sometimes why). The digital object that represents a person (or other identifiable entity) has attributes related to location (e.g., "current location:" with values that could be "home", "office", "car", "New York", "China", etc.) which can include current methods of contact. But there are also attributes which relate to the contact service providers: "AIM screen name", "T-Mobile phone number", etc. Each of these can, in turn, be considered a digital persona carrying it's own attributes: is the phone/application turned on? Is the associated user available for communication?

Robin Wilton has a great example in his blog showing the difference between "presence" and "identity" using RADAR. We should remember that "presence", at least as it's understood today by the communications providers, means that the hardware is present and receiving - but can't tell us who is using the hardware.