I've known about the Passel project for awhile now, but have been sworn to secrecy by David "dizzyd" Smith, who heads it up. But we're heading into OSCon, where Passel will be introduced formally next week, and everything is open to the everybody now.

Passel's wiki (its index page, above) begins,

Passel is a lightweight, user-centric identity system that enables people to manage their online identity. It is designed to maximize privacy and user-control of information which forms an identity. Passel is built on the idea that identity is composed of equal part social norms and 3rd-party verified information.

I wrote Names in Space at a location with marginal wi-fi coverage, and in the course of posting it put up four copies of the same item.

I just got rid of three of them. Unfortunately, one of them was the one that included the only comment. I screwed up somehow, since I thought that was the one-in-four I had saved.

Grr.

Anyway,

Hugh MacLeod has been pushing forward the notion of "tags, not trees" as a way to organize our understanding of the world.

He and his buddy Sig have been working on something Sig calls a "new tree-structure-free gizmo" that puts "anataxonomy" into practice.

Let's say you work in Hollywood. Or the contentious zone where Net-based tech and Hollywood overlap. And you have an agenda: transforming the whole entertainment industry.

Now let's say there's a conference with the same overlapping circles — Digital Hollywood — and the same agenda: transforming the industry. What would your subjects, your "tracks", be? What would your topics be? Who would you want for speakers and panelists?

Well, there is such a conference, and there is such an agenda. Digital Hollywood runs from September 19-21 this year at the Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel.

Here's a sampling:

I just got to the Catalyst conference in San Diego. And the first thing I read is Rick Segal's TEDGLOBAL vs. well, everything else, in which he covers differences between the TEDGLOBAL conference and two others he attended recently: reboot and Gnomedex. A sample:

So, as you hunt conferences to attend, find out how the important stuff is dealt with. Do speakers run overtime? Lots of Q&A? Do the speakers stick around? Before? After? All the normal questions that have a new set of meanings.

Jon "Hannibal" Stokes on the Apple-Intel thing:

I'm going to do something that I almost never do: spill insider information from unnamed sources that I can confirm are in a position to know the score. Note that this isn't the start of some kind of new trend for me. It's just that all this information that I've been sitting on is about to become dated, so it's time to get it out there.

I'm on the Gillmor Gang right now (we record on Fridays), where Mike Homer and Susan Mernit are guests. (The show will be available for podcast later.)
Mike is running the Open Media Network, which just launched. It distributes through Kontiki, which is kind of a supplier-controlled BitTorrent. Mike founded Kontiki. Now he's a customer of the service.

We're talking now about funding models for the "experience" we call public broadcasting. I'm gathering from Mike that viewer and listener support — the customer role many of us value playing, and which helps sustain our local public stations — accounts for a shrinking percentage of what the sources (NPR, PBS) require to produce high quality programming. Excuse me, content. So the new model is: watch this ad, and if you don't like it, pay us not to show it to you.

I think that's what Mike just said.

I just suggested that maybe the problem is that public broadcasting has become so expensive on the production side that they've unavoidably looked to the commercial model as the only way of paying for it.

The thread was dropped, but I'd like to keep it alive here. Or somewhere. Because I think it's a mistake.

Link in the 'log: The New Attention Driven Advertising... Part 2, by John Husband.

The revolution that matters is the demand side supplying itself. Not the supply side co-opting demand, and leveraging the old inefficient funding systems. (Not to say that's what Mike is doing here, but that's the kind of thing that happens when we talk about 'consumers' and 'audiences.')

Susan just said something about consumers wanting to experience what other consumers were seeing and doing, for example around what's happening in London. Eyewitness reports. True, but what matters here is that what's most worth reading here comes from producers who happen to be individuals. And what makes their productions worthwhile is the fact that other producers can reference the original producers as sources, reproduce them, add value to them, and drive forward what we know, together, about what's going on in the world.

Now Mike is talking about the Open Media Registry, from OurMedia, which is a cool thing.

Just noticed that the Open Media Network's service is browser-delivered, and headed toward Windows/IE first, with Firefox, Mac and Linux support planned later.

Mike just announced that they're open sourcing their client software. Which is cool.

Linux in Government: Understanding Federated Identity Management, Tom Adelstein's latest essay in Linux Journal. In response to the question What's Federated Identity Management (FIM)?, he says,

Actually, we should be asking how important is FIM. It's the lynchpin of digital convergence and probably one of the most important technologies of the modern era. Soon, we will begin to swim in digital television, multifunctional phones, devices of all kinds, and at the core of making all these things work together with our computer networks and the Internet lies identity management. At the core of identity management lies federation.

Then he outlines what's happening OASIS, SAML, WS-I, Microsoft, IBM, Ping Identity and SourceID, and how open source fits into the picture. He concludes,

We all might find some difficulty in finalizing our thoughts on federated identity management. Perhaps the momentum behind the standards and the technology could change, and we might wind up with a totally different solution that the ones existing today. Most people in the technology field will say that once people start down a certain road, though, they seem compelled to stay on it. I tend to think that the three standards will merge or learn to co-exist.

At the moment, federated identity management is becoming the next buzz word on the street. Those who do not know about it or understand it might find themselves challenged in their careers. I hope this article gives you a start on the path toward researching it.

Other starts include (in no particular order)...

Soon as Dave leaves Florida, they arrest a guy in St. Petersburg for using somebody's open Wi-Fi hotspot.

What do they mean, "using"? All they say is,

Police say Benjamin Smith III, 41, used his Acer brand laptop to hack into Dinon's wireless Internet network. The April 20 arrest is considered the first of its kind in Tampa Bay and among only a few so far nationwide.

This was just posted by Doug Skoglund over at my personal blog:

Since I must recognize and accept your involvement with the Linux community, I must reveal that I am a Windows programmer and a Microsoft basher, a combination in rather short supply. Unfortunately, most of the Linux contacts I have made, so far, were unable to separate the value of Windows from the evil of Microsoft, a prejudice that baffles me no end.

With that in mind -- do we have a possibility of constructive conversation??