Blog responses to my SxSW panel

I gathered these links and quotations within a day or so of the panel I moderated at South by Southwest, but since then I’ve been to another conference and am generally running behind. Still, I was pleased by many of these responses (and even the less positive ones provide useful criticism) so I wanted to make a point of reflecting them here:
Jason Toney at Blog is a Mix Tape wrote:
> * New etiquette rules really need to be established for online and mobile communication
> * Reputation, Identity, Presence, Nameplaces – these are my kinds of buzzwords
> * How does the desire for someone like me who wants a persistent online identity exist at the same time that many people (particularly young people) like the concept of disposable identity? Are their tools and applications that can make the web better for both types of folks?
> * What about those who want no online identity but still wants the tools that are increasingly requiring identity creation?

The author of swirlspice wrote:
> Started the day with Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence and Reputation…. This could have gone on for another hour. Mostly about managing your identity and how your reputation develops and propagates (your reputation is assigned to you more than you create it).
In Wired’s “Listening Post” blog, Laura Moorhead wrote Leave No Trail Behind:
> Who are you? Your Wikipedia entry or your last blog entry? What about that half-clothed avatar or raunchy kid from a few years back?
>
> The panel “Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence, and Reputation Online” reminds us — not that we needed it — that our identity lives on and it’s mutating out of control. Friends, enemies, and crazy exes (aka Sibils) augment it, and big companies, such as Amazon, Google, and Yahoo, use and benefit from it. Where’s the user control?
>
> Early on in the hour-long panel, Ted Nadeau, from Dot Line Inc., reminds us that though we’re all pro privacy, there really is no privacy online.
>
> Take a look at the top handful of sites trying to offer users control over their online identity – be that one or 12 personas – and expect to be disappointed. “Reputation 1.0 isn’t working – there’s no consistency in someone’s reputation,” says Nadeau. “There’s big thinking, but no one coding yet.”
>
> What’s the perfect reputation system? Perhaps, says Nadeau, one in which you can move your persona from one web site to another, with different data stores and key spaces (say, your copy, that of others and a shared version).
>
> This is pretty much what panelist Kaliya Hamlin, a freelance evangelist for open standards in user-centric identity (OpenID2, i-names, XRI/XDI, SAML, icards, Higgins), backs. With OpenID2, she says, you travel the web with your identity. Essentially, you own it, and there’s no breadcrumb trail for online companies to feed off.
>
> Mary Hodder, founder of Dabble, a social search site, goes on to ask, Why shouldn’t users own all their clicks? Hodder put this question to companies like Amazon and Google — and (amazingly) they agreed. She’s even got a tool to track a person’s online life via clicks.
>
> This idea of leave no trail behind is big. Eliot Van Buskirk’s article about the RIAA’s latest poison pen shows us why users might want to own a copy of all their online wanderings and actions.
>
> Another option (I think from Hodder and Hamlin): If all our info is public, but anonymous, that’s even better.
>
> One last nugget from Hodder: We’re agreeing to things we don’t understand. Consider Google’s deal with San Francisco to set up the city with a wireless network. Taxpayers are giving up their “attention data” — their online entities — for 17 years. Hodder says that’s worth millions, far more than the cost of the wireless setup. Shouldn’t the city or someone get a cut?
Bill Humphries wrote in his blog Whump, I’m a 10th Level Link Blogger:
> Liz Henry: Ted Nadeau says our non-monetary assets are: Identity, Attention, Intention, Influence, Reputation. (In addition to Str Dex Int Wis Con Cha.)”
Laura Fisher wrote in her a later date blog:
> Attended a great panel, moderated by Christian Crumlish, on web identity and attention. There were some terrific things said; I took notes – it deserves a post of its own.
Laura Porto wrote in Digital Dialogs:
> Identity and reputation in the digital space is one of those gigantic topics to try to tackle in an hour. This panel provided some discussion starters, but unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to go deeper.
>
> * Mary Hodder made the suggestion that we all be transparent about what we do online so that the government can’t stigmatize certain people or certain behaviors
> * Ted Nadeau made the point that while you are connected to your identity you are not in control of it
> * George Kelly showed us the interactive Johari window as an example of how our reputations so not belong to us, but rather to the people who interact with us
>
> One of the most interesting points of the panel came from an audience participant who asked about changing identity. We are, after all, a young industry. How will we feel about having one identity in 10 or 20 or 30 years? I for one, find it fun to Google my Usenet entries circa 95.
>
> Another interesting point raised was how we manage the public versus private space.”
Rob Pongsajapan wrote in arrivals/departures:
> One panel that was excellent, however, was the Christian Crumlish-moderated panel on identity, attention, presence and reputation. I was trading notes with Aly after the session and sent her my impression of the panel: “Mary Hodder didn’t disappoint,” I texted.
In Composite: Thoughts on Poetics Liz Henry transcribed very accurate notes and wrote, “Wow, I dig all the stuff Ted has been saying.”
In Eco-Geekery Brian Fitzgeral wrote:
> This was a great panel, really well facilitated by Christian Crumlish, author *The Power of the Many*. He’s working on a new book, and claims “my scam was to put this panel together, take notes on what they say, and sneak it into my book.” Man, that is SO going to be a book if he does so. His online identities are. xian, mediajunkie.
Chris Hunter wrote in jugglebird:
> I’m at SXSW early for a panel on reputation and identity. It started out very slow, with the moderator, Christian Crumlish, rambling on without making many definitive statements.
>
> Ted Nadeau went next, with an admitted preface that he was new to identity and reputation. While his talk was rambling, he threw out some interesting observations about existing reputation systems (eBay, LinkedIn, Slashdot, etc…) but generally noting the lack of widespread and open reputation systems. It definitely seems like there’s an opportunity for something tied to OpenID and given the direction LoTV is headed, it’s worth paying attention to this area.”
>
> Mary Hodder spoke next about the Attention Trust, starting with an example of how Google uses attention in the form of links and AdSense to power their businesses. She related that the Attention Trust founders actually had a much easier time than expected in getting large internet companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc…) to release this information to their users.”
>
> The last panelist, George Kelly, spoke about the interactive johari window which allows an individual to self-select attributes and then compare them to the attributes selected by others. The inverse, a nohari window, allows the selection of negative attributes with the same kind of comparison and filtering.”
The author of worldmegan took extensive notes, including this:
> This panel is called Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence and Reputation. Christian Crumlish is our moderator. He seems nice, though very sleepy. Poor west coast people. Hell, I’M sleepy.
and notes on the discussion of an attention economy:
> Attention: The “attention economy,” what is this thing? It’s actually incredibly consequental that Google is collecting your information – this has to do with the attention economy. A link to a site is a vote of confidence in Google’s eyes. Rank results are based on this, are based on what a person clicks when they search for something. Adsense is also based on all of this. The “attention trust” asserts that you own a copy of this information. (Attention is still bothering me, I’m not quite getting it.) Seth Goldstein and Steve Gilmore started the attention trust, Mary is explaining. They got everybody to agree that the users own a copy of their attention streams. An attention stream is all those clicks you put into your browser, all these things someone is recording. There’s also a recorder you can use to record your own stream, it sounds like… this is actually really interesting! I like Mary Hodder.”
Rex Hammond did some very thorough very thorough liveblogging.
Will Kern wrote in 15 Meanings:
> The first panel I went to was Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence and Reputation, which consisted of Christian Crumlish from Yahoo!, Kaliya Hamlin from Identity Woman, Mary Hodder from Dabble, George Kelly from the Contra Costa Newspapers and Ted Nadeau from Dot Line Inc. The title of the panel seemed very intriguing and I thought I could gain a lot out of it and how it applies to social networking.
>
> There were a few things I took away, but not necessarily how they directly applied to social networking. Kaliya talked about identity and namespaces, which I thought was good. She illustrates how OpenID like services work she was pitching the Yadis protocol, which would bring the various OpenID like options into 1 single sign on.
>
> Ted discussed reputation (which he knowingly admitted that prior to a few days ago; he did not know much about the subject matter, kinda scary). With that being said, he did make some good points on the matter. He defined what reputation is as it pertains to the web and how you are not the primary authority on your reputation as it appears differently to different people.
And Leisa Reichelt wrote in her blog disambiguity:
> Every Breath You Take – an incredibly intelligent, engaging and interesting panel on identity, attention and reputation which are topics that I’m finding incredibly interesting at the moment. There are all kinds of problems and opportunities around identity at the moment and this panel, including Christian Crumlish, Ted Nadeau, Mary Hodder, Kaliya Hamlin and George Kelly took a run at some of them. I’m still thing about the idea of Identity Friction and how we need to increase identity friction in virtual spaces to better replicate how it works in the ‘real world’.
On the whole, I think we managed to spark some interesting thoughts and kick off some much needed conversations around these vital concepts for the social, living web.
**Note:** I’ve added Ted Nadeau’s slides to my own in an earlier post to this blog.