Land Grabs, Business Models and Open Standards

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Land Grabs, Business Models and Open Standards
I know, it's a busy day today, with a lot of links, but I do want to pass along this diagram of the 'ID stack layers' from Marc Canter. He writes, "OpenID is a way to authenticate users, and microformats is one form of a data format - but it's not enough. FOAF should probably also be included in the mix - but the technical facts are that this problem gets solved by an entire stack of solutions - all leading to the idealistic world we all want." Quite right. Because right now we're still in the 'land baron' era, where developers corral a bunch of users, lock them into place, and monetize them. We need to be able to allow people to move their attributes from site to site. More...