Code talks, talk walks, Craig Burton just said in a phone conversation about IIW #12, which is coming up in Mountain View in the first week of May: the week after next. I like the spirit of that statement. Lots of VRM and related development efforts will be present there. Same goes for lots of APIs, and opportunities to improve them and hook them together. So we should see some good hacking done there and shown off as well.
Toward the API side of that, Craig points us to Punctuated Equilibrium, Celestial Navigation, and APIs, a slide deck by Sam Ramji (@sramji), Dan Jacobson (@daniel_jacobson) and Michael Hart (@michaelhart). Sam and Michael are both at Apigee . Michael worked on the Netflix API. And Dan came to Netflix after doing great work on NPR’s excellent API. Sam gave a great talk along the same lines a few weeks back at Kynetx’ Impact 2011 conference. (Photos start here. My own slides are here.) I hope one or more of those guys can come down, show off what they’re doing and help us out.
I know there will be other newcomers to IIW, though I don’t want to say who yet. (Let’s let that be a pleasant surprise.) What I know is that they’ll bring work they’re doing, and expect to contribute and not just to hang out and talk about stuff. Obviously, we need to talk. In fact, IIW is home to more productive talking than I’ve ever heard at any other conference of any kind, thanks to its open space-sytle format, and Kaliya Hamlin‘s expert facilitation. (Speaking of which, here’s Kaliya’s post about possible IIW topics.)
IIW has been focused on identity for the duration (that’s been its middle name). Identity is still a big issue — maybe bigger than ever — but the contexts have been changing, especially around a core VRM concern: growing independence and capacity for action and interaction by individuals, especially in respect to data we each either gather for ourselves or share with others. This is what the Personal Data Ecosystem (of which VRM plays a role) is all about. On deck at IIW will be many approaches, technologies, protocols and other other developments toward personal data control and sharing. To visit a few, check the last two links.
Craig suggests that the growing connections between individuals and institutions (corporate or otherwise), especially through APIs, constitutes a new form of infrastructure. And, like me, he thinks that infrastructure itself needs to be visited as a topic, since we’ll be making more and more of it ourselves, and in cooperation with others. So, that’s a topic too.
Personally, I think we’re at the end of the Web 2.0 era and at the start of something less numeral and far more profound. Louis Gray calls it the Third Wave of the Web: one that’s uniquely personal. I agree. From the corporate side, this looks like personalization. But that’s not enough. In fact, personalization without personal independence is just more of the same, but with a smaller bull’s eye. We need to be the same independent, sovereign, autonomous human beings on the Net that we are in the physical world. I wrote about the problem with the current (mostly corporate and silo’d) social media matrix in A Sense of Bewronging.
What I say there, and have said many times before, is that we’re nearing the end of a bubble period, especially around “social” you-name-it, and its defaulted business model: advertising. I spoke about this a bit at the IAB (Internet Advertising Board) Annual Leadership meeting in Palm Springs, on February 28. The show’s theme was “The People vs. Data”, and I was joined in conversation on stage with John Battelle (at his invitation, good man). The title of the meeting (with >1000 attending, and in the room) was “Data, Privacy and Control — Unpacking the Role of the Consumer in the Media and Marketing Ecosystem.” John and I had some interesting back-and-forths on our blogs (see here), and carried the same exchange forward in front of many hundreds of folks in the very hot online advertising business. A short video hunk of the conversation is here on YouTube. I have other notes, which I’ll put up after I get back from my current trip. Meanwhile, many open tabs need to be closed, so here is a rundown, in no particular order:
- Building a personal commenting system using Twitter and Kynetx, by Phil Windley.
- Can VRM help regulate “blind” bidding wars? By Real Estate Cafe.
- #VRM Community Structure, by Moxy Tongue
- PaySwarm, and its possible synergies with EmanciPay.
- WebID, from the W3C. PaySwarm uses it.
- W3C Workshop on Identity in the Browser, in late May.
- Let’s move Tweeting off Twitter. @Evan Promdromou offered help with that, via Status.net.Here’s the tweet count on that post. Also on Twitter Failings.
- rstat.us. Another microblogging approach.
- Personal Data: The Emergence of a New Asset Class, by the World Economic Forum
- @DaveWineron “building a microblogging platform without Twitter in the middle“
- World Economic Forum and Personal Data as an Asset Class, Constellations of Privacy and Fourth Parties are Agents. Third Parties Aren’t Necessarily., all by @JoeAndrieu. The last item responds to Fourth Parties and VRM.
- The SugarCon Connection: Conversational Commerce Meets Classic CRM, by Dan Miller
- Web 2.0, The Cloud and Vendor Lock-In, by Klint Finleyat ReadWriteWeb.
- The Locker Project, Telehash and You. @Jeremie Miller’s upcoming talk at RWW’s 2-way Summit in June.
- Self-surveillance privacy draft, by UCLA law professor Jerry Kang. The full draft is also online.
- MTDS, by dotcomma.
- This Bubble is Different, in BusinessWeek. Best line, by Jeff Hammerbacher of Cloudera: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads…That sucks.”
- The Irony of Social Advertising, by Jay Deragon.
- Digital Hollywood’s agenda. It will be going on at the same time as IIW. Compare and contrast.
- BitCoin, the personal currency.
- Palantir, just because they’re interesting. One hint why.
- Are we awake? by Harold Jarche. On workforce reformation.
- 88+ Projects & Standards for Data Ownership, Identity, & A Federated Social Web by Venessa Meimis
- Personal Data is the Future, but Does Anybody Care, by Tara Hunt (@missrogue) of Buyosphere
- If hype were broadband, the U.S. would be #1, by Bruce Kushnick. Off-topic, but not on the hype side, which is why I put it here.
- The Mydex prototype. William Heath writes, “Mydex, working with Azigo and building on the Higgins platform, has trialled a live PDS with registration and population of data store external verification of identity and claims, and two-way data exchange between individuals and organisation (London Borough of Brent). The trial included personalised web browsing driven from the PDS. Still working with Azigo and Higgins, Mydex is now recruiting to scale up to a full ‘purple button’ live service.”
- Connect.me. More from Drummond Reed about what’s up with that, among other VRM and IIW things.
- Azigo. More from Paul Trevithick about what’s up with that, among other VRM and IIW things.
I’ll add more later in two new posts, one about a VRM vertical, the other about a VRM horizontal. The vertical is health care. The horizontal is legal (because it cuts across everything). I suppose identity does too, but we just covered that.
Volunteer some below as well.