Scripting News:...Third reason, it's time to solve the global identity problem. We can't trust Microsoft to do this. By now they must know that.

Amen. My first request is: I want to control my identity and decide who is going to have access to it and who isn't. I'm very happy not to delegate this to Microsoft simply because I don't trust them.

Btw: after discussion group threads, I also want to be able to track weblog conversations, like the one going on here between this blog, Dave's and several others that will write in a few hours about this issue. I know that there already are several technologies trying to do this, but none is final.

Trial balloon: "A simple addition to discussion group software makes it easy for a user to go to one place to monitor all conversations he or she is part of." [Scripting News]

Very interesting approach. Decentralized simple and efficient. I wonder who could provide such service. Once enough discussion group providers will be compatible (I bet it won't take much time), someone will have to run a central server. It could be the weblogging application providers or a third party.

These third parties (the system is designed to be decentralized, hopefully we will be able to choose our identity provider) will need revenue streams to keep the server running. I paid $10 for Technorati, I would probably pay for this service as well. But how many others would? Considering that the "free stuff times" are over, each new idea should have its own means to stay afloat. What is the new business model for these services? How is Technorati doing?

And to whoever will start working on this project, while you solve this problem, why don't you consider managing my identity as a vCard as well? I could collect contacts as well as comments in that app, provided that the owner of the data il willing to share it with me, of course. (read below)

Ever since I read about the SMBmeta proposal I started thinking about a similar approach to identify bloggers. Since I started this weblog I have virtually met dozens of people and honestly I'm starting to loose track. What I mean is that it is hard to interact with somebody you have never met, who is often located on some other side of the world (sometimes I don't even know where), a few time zones away.

It would be good to be able to somehow manage these contacts in a logic and possibly automated way.

From my little research it looks like the vCard format is the most widely used to manage contacts. It is already compatible with the software I use to manage contacts (MacOS X Address Book), my Palm, my iPod, even my Nokia phone.

While I was thinking about all this yesterday I got an email from somebody saying:

Hello,

You are in my address book, however I am missing key information about you.

Please click the "Add Details" link and provide your missing details. A web form is used to assist you however the information provided is never stored on the web - GoodContacts software on my PC receives your input via email and directly updates my address book.

So it really looks like somebody is working with this stuff. The message also had a vCard of the sender attached, which I dragged to my Address Book and got me the full info about the person who sent the message updated on my computer (and my Palm, my phone, my iPod, etc.).

At this point I would be tempted to link here my vCard, maybe even start to think about some new meta tag to add to these pages code but... it would also mean starting getting tons of spam almost immediately since all spiders out there would pick my email address up in seconds. While I agree on the fact that I am already getting a lot of spam and that getting my address out there is important, I'm trying to figure out a way to solve this riddle.

Meanwhile, here's my vCard compressed as a .zip file, hoping that those spam spiders won't figure it out