B. Mann Consulting

Tris writes about controversy coming from Debbie Weil:

Somehow I don't think Debbie intended to start an international firestorm when she came to support me at my Mesh Blogging 101 workshop.  She posted right away and mentioned that she was surprised some of the questions, that they were similar to the questions we fielded a couple years ago.

I saw that she posted and left a comment.  Look I spent most of the day hanging out with Debbie including post-conference dinner, she really, really didn't mean it like it came out.  She edited that post and came out with another soon after.

All of this got the attention of BusinessWeek's Blogspotting blog, oh dear.

One of the phrases from Debbie was "Interesting, though, that they're such close neighbors and yet the "mind set" and knowledge level about blogging is a beat or two behind.". So, I was *at* most of the blogging conferences in the US two years ago. Specifically, early 2004, Will Pate and I and a ton of other Canadian folks descended on the Business Blogging Conference in Seattle. I seem to remember Debbie saying a rather naive comment at the time...

VeriSign chose OpenID for their new "Personal Identity Provider", aka pip: http://pip.verisignlabs.com/.

I'm a bit confused. OpenID handily does single sign on. But that's it. I can understand not deploying a huge SAML stack -- all of those blogs and web apps that they talk about it in the announcement post have no way of easily interoperating with SAML today, aka lack of scripty language support -- but OpenID is fairly limited today. Be interesting to see if VeriSign will push Simple Registration Protocol and/or extend the OpenID "spec" and/or standardize it in some way as DIX is doing (or merge/interoperate/implement DIX?).

If I were VeriSign, I would follow this up with support for multiple identity protocols -- that is, after all, Canter's Law: work with everything. You could have a single identity hosted by VeriSign and accessible via a variety of protocols, from OpenID to DIX to SAML to InfoCard.

It certainly is great to see experimentation actually starting to happen in this space. At the Mesh conference, which I've just come back from, I heard some rumours about a potential 10M profile installation of DIX. Exciting times...

Looks like Mesh Conference was just announced -- a "Web 2.0" conference for Canada. At $350 for 2 days, I have to think about this vs. Gnomedex. Of course, those are Canadian pesos, so lots less. Many interesting faces, but not a lot of details on tracks, conference style, etc. The blurb from one of the first blog posts goes like this:

There is all this buzz around Web 2.0. But what’s really happening, especially around here? Does anybody know? Can anybody help me understand it, and what it means for me? My business? My future? My family? My world?

mesh’s mandate will be to answer this question in as compelling, credible and authentic a way possible. Everything to do with the event will be around furthering that objective, and the content itself will serve to help mesh participants (not attendees :-)) to really start to get it, this year and in years to come. We will create the Canadian forum for next generation Web ideas and leaders.