I’ve been meaning to say this on my blog ever since the opening ceremonies in Vancouver. But since I just had the chance to recreate the experience on the Web, let me say it loud and clear for the record:

kd lang: Hallelujah.

First, my apologies to everyone who commented on Fixing the Google Account Problem. For some reason WordPress stopped notifying me about comment approval (I’m using Akismet but I still find the majority of comments that get through it are spam, so I moderate comments). So I just logged in and found a bunch of great comments, including several that I replied to.

Three clear themes emerge from these:

1. The problem is even worse if Google Apps is involved. Apparently there isn’t a solution to merging a Google account and a Google Apps account yet (which frightens me because I’m about to need to set up my first Google Apps account).
2. Using email addresses as primary account identifiers is problematic, period.
3. Internet identity managment, especially at scale, is hard. A lot harder than it looks.

I’m told the good folks at Google have been discussing this. Please feel free to add more suggestions about exactly what you think they should do.

I receive an email from a friend:

Drummond,
As my Word expert, how do I turn off the “balloon” captioning of redline changes?

I think, “Good question. I have no idea. I’ve often wondered that myself.” I’m about to start typing that answer to his email when I remember The Incredible Internet Answer Machine

I open a browser tab and type into the Google Search Bar “Microsoft Word bal…”

Google’s AutoSuggest completes it to “Microsoft Word balloons”.

I click Search.

In .25 seconds the answer is back and the second entry on the list is:

“How to turn off balloons for comments and tracking changes in Word“

.25 seconds. My brain doesn’t even think that fast.

I know reams have been written about “are we all getting dumber because the Internet is getting smarter?”

But still, it does take my breath away, almost every day.

In another one for the “new heights of irony” file: I was using Gmail this morning and once again wondered about the little orange dot that appears next to the names of some email senders.

I’d wondered at least a half dozen times before what this meant, because when you hover over it, there’s no balloon (there should be, Google).

So this morning I finally asked The Incredible Internet Answer Machine.

I just opened another tab and typed “Orange dot in Gmail” into my Google search bar.

The #1 hit (in .29 seconds) was the exact answer to my question…

…in Yahoo Answers!

(We’re going to have to rename it The Incredible Internet Irony Machine )

BTW, the answer is: Orange means the sender is using Gmail but is in “idle” status because they haven’t looked at their Gmail page in awhile – they are busy using some other browser tab or application. Green = active on Gmail now, Red = busy, Grey = offline.

Every so often you experience a technical problem you can’t find any information about and which takes you forever to solve. Then, after you finally solve it, you are left scratching your head saying, “I don’t get it­—there must be millions of people with this problem—why is there so little information about it?”

Once before, back in 1991, I ran into such a problem with Windows 3.0. After finally solving it, I shared my solution with my friend Seattle Times tech columnist Paul Andrews. He published it in his column, and it turned out that thousands of people had the same problem but nobody understood quite what was happening. So that’s why there was so little information about it.

Now 20 years later, even though we’ve got the Internet and Google and all, I’ve just been through the same experience. And the irony? The problem is with none other than Google accounts—the very accounts that we need from this search giant to access many of the services it offers.

Over the holidays I finally bore down, worked the problem all the way through, and solved it. And throughout the process I was consistently stunned to find so little information available about it, either from Google or anywhere else.

So this time around I’m being proactive about it and publishing the solution right here so it will be easy for anyone to reference. (And, of course, for Google’s own search engine to find — the Internet brings new heights to irony.)

Warning: read this all the way through. The easy fixes are also the ones you may live to regret.

The Problem

1. A friend shares a Google doc with you.
2. You receive an email containing a link to this Google doc.
3. When you click on the link, you are prompted to log into your Google account, but once you do, you can’t get access to the doc because the email address that the friend used is not the same email address you used to originally create your Google account.

Arrggh! (That’s an exact quote from an email I just received from a friend for whom I’m solving this problem by writing this blog post!)

The Simple Solution That Will Get You In Trouble

There is a simple solution for which I thank George Fletcher of AOL, who first explained it to me and others on the OpenID mailing list who were having this problem a few years ago.

The solution is: register a new Google account under the email address that your friend used to share the Google doc with you.

It’s very easy…BUT…read the warning afterwards as to why it’s a red herring.

1. Go to http://google.com.
2. If you are signed in, sign out (top right corner).
3. On the next screen (the plain jane Google home screen), click the Sign in link in the top right corner.
4. On that screen, underneath the login box on the right, click the link “Don’t have a Google account? Create an account now”.
5. Even though you may already have a Google account, enter the email address you want to register for another Google account (the one your friend sent the Google doc too).
6. Confirm the email address via the standard process.
7. When you are done, log in using to this new Google account (using the email address you just registered, not the one for your other Google account).
8. Go to Google Docs (http://docs.google.com).
9. The Google Doc your friend shared with you will be on the list.

Yes, it’s that simple. BUT…

The New Problem This Creates

The reason NOT to solve the problem this way, to which I can attest by long and painful experience, is that while you will now have access to all the Google docs shared with you…you will also have to log in and log back out of each of your different Google accounts in order to access the different sets of Google docs shared with you under your different email addresses.

This might seem like a small pain at first, but believe me, after the 500^th time you will be wishing there was a better way.

There is.

The Better Solution…That Still Isn’t the Right Answer

The “better way” is a standard feature of almost any identity or directory system: aliases. (Disclaimer: I’m in the Internet identity business, so this is the kind of stuff I deal with all the time.) In an identity or directory context, an “alias” is just an alternate name for the same account. And in fact Google accounts supports aliases. What’s interesting, though, is that: a) they don’t call them “aliases”, and b) aliases for Google accounts are completely different than aliases for Gmail accounts.

Gmail accounts, you ask? What’s the difference between a Google account and a Gmail account?

Therein lies a whole ‘nother can of worms (and possibly the reason there is so little information about the Google account problem).

Let me start by explaining the difference (as best I understand it – this WHOLE BLOG POST is an open invitation for the good folks at Google to correct any of my misunderstandings and provide better explanations).

First, a Google account and a Gmail account are not exactly the same thing. The first rule is: every Gmail account is a Google account, but NOT every Google account is a Gmail account.

In other words, if you have a Google account that is NOT a Gmail address, then you have a Google account that is NOT a Gmail account.

The second rule is: BOTH a Google account AND a Gmail address can have an alias. BUT THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING, AND NEITHER CALLS THEM ALIASES.

I am not making this up. An alias on a Google account (and remember, every Gmail account IS also a Google account) is another name for the entire Google account. But for Gmail, an alias is ONLY an alternate email address that you can send or receive email from using your Gmail account. A GMAIL ALIAS IS NOT A GOOGLE ACCOUNT ALIAS. A GOOGLE ACCOUNT ALIAS IS NOT A GMAIL ALIAS.

Is that clear as mud?

Now, adding an alias to a Gmail account is quite easy, remarkably powerful (most people have no idea how much flexibility Gmail offers to manage your email for any number of email accounts), and surprisingly poorly documented. I just spent 10 minutes searching Gmail for help on this just to see if there was a Gmail help page I could just link to.

Nope.

So here’s how.

Instructions for Adding an Alias to Your Gmail Account (but NOT for your Google Account Even If It Is a Gmail Account!)

1. Login to your Gmail account.
2. Click the Settings link in the top right.
3. Click the Accounts and Import tab.
4. In the second section, Send mail as, click the button labelled, Send mail from another address.
5. Enter the email address as instructed.
6. Google will send you an email with a link you must click to verify you own the address.
7. Go to that mail account, find the mail, click the link (it all takes about 30 seconds).

You’re done. Go back to your Gmail Settings page, click the Accounts and Import tab, and the new email address will be listed in the Send mail as section. You can now send email from this email address by choosing it in the “From” drop down box in Gmail. (See the help link for more info about the different ways you can send mail from a Gmail alias.)

You can add as many email adddresses as aliases to your Gmail account as you want (at least I couldn’t find documentation about a limit). But keep in mind that all of these will ONLY be Gmail account aliases, not Google account aliases — and having them as Gmail aliases does nothing to solve the Google account problem.

So you have to go through a different process — even with the same set of email addresses — to make them Google account aliases. (For example, I have the same four email addresses as BOTH Gmail aliases and Google account aliases.)

The following instructions apply for adding an alias to ANY Google account (whether or not it is a Gmail account), BUT—and this is a big BUT—if your Google account is NOT a Gmail account, keep reading afterwards about why this can come back to bite you.

Instructions for Adding an Alias to Any Google Account (Even If It Is a Gmail Account)

1. Go to www.google.com/accounts. That is the home page for configuring any Google account. If you’re currently logged into Google, Google figures out which Google account you are using via a cookie in your browser. If you’re not logged in, they’ll prompt you to login, and the Google account you will be configuring is based on the email address you use to login.
2. Once you are logged in, confirm it is the correct Google account by checking the email address in black text at the very top of the page (on the left side of the block of links in the top right corner). If this is the right account, proceed. If this is not the right account, meaning you want to add an alias to a different Google account, then sign out (upper right corner), then sign back in under the email address for that different Google account.
3. Under Personal Settings in the top center of the page, the entry at the bottom of the column will be Email addresses. If you have not yet added any aliases to this Google account, you will see only one email address—the same email address as at the top of the page. It will have the grey words (Primary email) next to it. This is the “primary key” for this Google account. You can’t change it! See the warning below.
4. To add an alias (do you see the word “alias” anywhere near here? Or anywhere on this screen? Does Google give you any clue that this is where you should go to access such a feature??), click the Edit link below this email address.
5. On the next screen (https://www.google.com/accounts/EditUserInfo), you will see two blocks: Edit personal information and Add an alternate email address to your account. You want this second block.
6. At the bottom of this second block is a text box labeled: Add an additional email address. Enter the email address you want to add as an alias (the one to which your friend shared the Google doc you can’t access) and click Save.
7. The next screen will tell you that you’ve been sent an email to verify that address.
8. When you receive the email, click the link in the email.

Congratulations, you have just set up that email address to be an alias for your existing Google account.

The benefits?

1. It no longer matters which of your two email addresses your friends share a Google doc with. Either way, the Google doc they shared will show up in your Google docs dashboard at http://docs.google.com. As far as I know, this is true for all the email addresses you add as an alias (again, I don’t know if there is a limit).
2. You no longer have to log in and out of two different Google accounts. All your Google docs will be there in your one master account. Hooray!

Now for the final gotcha. You can do all the above and still end out with a royal headache one day because of the following rule Google explains when you register an alias as described above:

You can use alternate email addresses to sign in to your Google Account, recover your password, and more. Alternate email addresses can only be associated with one Google Account at a time.

In other words, for good security reasons, you can only add an email address as an alias to one Google account at a time. On the surface that doesn’t appear to be an issue…until you circle back to what I explained above…that every Gmail address is also a Google account. By simple deductive logic, you arrive at this conclusion:

You cannot add a Gmail address as an alias to ANY Google account!

In other words, at Google, all email addresses can all serve as primary keys for Google accounts BUT only only non-Gmail accounts can serve as an alias (a secondary key).

So it boils down to this: if have a Gmail account, or ever plan to get one, then you are forcing yourself into the multiple-Google account problem for life UNLESS…

…you make your Gmail account your primary Google account.

Yup, that’s the secret. As long as you make your primary Google account a Gmail account, you’ll never have the problem of wanting to use Gmail but finding yourself forced into the multiple-Google account problem.

What To Do If You Already Have the Multiple Google Account Problem

Okay, say you’ve already fallen into this trap. You did what I did several years ago: created your own non-Gmail Google account using a non-Gmail email address so you could access Google docs under that email address. Then later you started using Gmail, and so now you have at least two Google accounts (and maybe more). And people are constantly sharing Google docs with you under one or the other of the two (or more) email addresses, and you are driving yourself nuts logging in and out of Google trying to remember which email address was used to share which Google doc.

But you CAN’T take your non-Gmail email address and make it an alias to your Gmail Google account (as I advise) because your non-Gmail address is already a Google account.

How do you fix it?

The answer is: a) completely undocumented (at least I couldn’t find it), and b) scary as hell.

That’s why I’m writing this blog post. There’s no reason Google needs to make this so hard. Why they haven’t written it up in one of their generally decent Help articles I have no clue. I even wrote one of my identity friends at Google to ask him. His answer was essentially, “This is just too hard for most users to understand.”

Well, that may be true, but IMHO it’s not a reason to withhold the documentation. The users who are experiencing the problem are highly motivated to understand it, and in fact the solution is pretty easy once you know what it is.

It’s just scary.

In brief, the way to make a non-Gmail Google account an alias for your Gmail account is to first delete the non-Gmail Google account.

Completely. Kaput. Gone. Which, as you might suspect, would ordinarily mean YOU LOSE EVERYTHING ASSOCIATED WITH THAT ACCOUNT.

How’s that for a scary thought? Honestly, that’s why I held off fixing this for so long. Who wants to bother with working around that?

Luckily, the workaround is not that hard once you know what it is and you are sure it is going to work. That’s the other reason I’m writing this blog post: I could not find anything posted anywhere – or even get it confirmed by those I knew at Google – that this procedure would work and everything would be okay in the end.

But I finally got so tired of the problem that I just did it, and I’m happy to say it works just fine.

So: please read and follow the instructions below carefully. I don’t want anyone coming back and telling me that they lost precious data because of my advice that they delete their Google account.

Part One: Share (or Otherwise Backup) All the Data in the Google Account

1. First, make sure you have at least one other Google account (preferably a Gmail account—see above—however this procedure should work with any other Google account. In these instructions I’ll assume this other account is a Gmail account.)
2. Go to the home page of the Google Account you want to delete at  https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount.
3. Make sure this is the account you want to delete by checking the correct email address in black text at left end of the links at the very top of the page.
4. Under Personal Settings, click on the Dashboard link (second one down) called “View data stored with this account”.
5. This helpful utility (created for personal privacy management) will show you all the data you have at Google associated with this account. Now comes the hard part. You need to go through every Google service on this list, then go through any associated documents or data files for each of those services, and share them with your Gmail account. Even more importantly, if you are the owner any document/file, then transfer ownership to your Gmail account. If you don’t own a document/file (someone else shared it with you), don’t worry, you can’t lose it when you delete this Google account. But, as long as you have Edit privileges on the document/file, share it with your Gmail account just so you don’t have to go back to the original owner and ask them to reshare it later. If whomever shared it with you DIDN’T give you Edit privileges, just contact them and have them share it again with your Gmail account.
6. Did I say do this for EVERY document/file in EVERY Google service you use? Go back to your Personal Dashboard and check it again.
7. IMPORTANT: as a final check, log into your Gmail account and VERIFY that all the docs are shared. If you own the document/file, VERIFY that your Gmail account is the new owner.
8. Check everything one more time. If you are unsure than anything has been shared and will not go “poof” when you delete this Google account, just download a copy to your local hard drive (or email it to your Gmail account). Like I said, never come back to me and say you lost any Google data because of this blog post.

Part Two: Delete the Google Account

1. Go back to the home page for the Google account you want to delete: https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount.
2. MAKE SURE this is the right Google account by confirming the email address in black at left end of the links at the very top of the page.
3. Next to the My products header (the second horizontal section down the page), click the Edit link. This should take you to https://www.google.com/accounts/EditServices.
4. The second option on the page is to Delete Account. Choose that option and follow the instructions to confirm you want to permanently delete this account (and wipe that sweat off your brow). Seriously, if you’ve shared or backed up all the files associated with this account, you’ve nothing to fear. It’s just like reformatting a hard drive <ouch>.

Once you’re done, take a deep breath. Wait 15 minutes. (I don’t know if you actually have to wait this long, but I figured it’s long enough to wait for Google’s servers to go through all their account deletion machinations.)

Part Three: Add The Alias to Your Primary Google Account

1. Log back in to your Gmail account (or whichever Google account you want to make your primary).
2. Follow the instructions earlier in this blog post to add the email address (for the Google account you just deleted) as an alias to this Google account.
3. Once Google confirms it as an alias, you’re done.

Problem solved.

Why It’s Still Not Perfect: A Final Warning

It’s worth pointing out that privacy, not just security, can be an issue with account aliases. Sometimes you don’t want someone to know you are using Gmail address to do all this cool stuff. But if your Gmail account is your primary Google account (as I advise), then take note of the following warning:

Note: In some Google services, if you share your alternate email address with your contacts, they might be able to learn your primary email address.

In short, Google hasn’t fully figured out yet how to provide you with completely separate personas on the Web. In my personal opinion, they would be well-advised to do so. It’s not easy — acheiving this level of privacy can be as hard as acheiving corresponding levels of security. But Google has the talent and, I believe, the motivation to attain this goal. I hope they consider it soon.

Someday I’ll tell the rest of the story about why I’m posting the following link. But for right now, let me just recommend you read it.

I was never particularly close to John Hughes movies — though I did like The Breakfast Club — but that’s not the point of this story. It’s a story about John Hughes as a person, and the difference it made in one girl’s life.

After I read it — and almost started crying myself — I noticed it has a whooping 1151 comments.

Read it and you’ll know why.

We’ll Know When We Get There: Sincerely, John Hughes

One advantage of having a 13-year old son is that you have an excuse to go see a summer blockbuster movie on the very first night it comes out.

I never did that as a kid, which is one reason I let my son (and his biggest ally in such guilty pleasures, my wife) talk me into it.

And boy, was it worth it. I love films, especially world class dramas, but there’s something extra special about a Hollywood popular movie that somehow turns fun into its own high art. The first Pirates of the Caribbean, the original Spiderman film (and to a lesser extent the third), and last summer’s Dark Knight all fit this bill.

Now you can add this Star Trek. Where exactly they found the energy, humor, and drive in this film I have no idea. How it plays gently, lovingly, and brilliantly off the original while at the same time channelling its own unique spirit and energy still has me doing a mental whistle each time I think about it.

This one will be a good old-fashion b-l-o-c-k-b-u-s-t-e-r at the box office. But don’t go see it for that reason. Go because it will make you happy that so many generations can enjoy a story for so many generations.

Having just been to RSA, which is the essence of a trade show, and being about to go to Gluecon, which I’m hoping will be the essence of a conference, I find the distinction between conferences and trade shows that Eric makes in this blog post very useful.

Of course, the most conferency conference is an unconference like the Internet Identity Workshop. If you’ve never been to an unconference like this, you MUST try it. (Warning: you’ll never want to go back.)

Spring is around the corner and that means IIW. The next one is May 18-20 in the standard location: the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

Early registration is particularly important this year – 75 registrations are needed by the end of March to secure the space.

This continues to be, year after year, where Internet identity happens. If you have to pick only one identity event to attend, this is it.

See you there.

If you need to understand Internet identity quickly and at a deeper level than you can glean from blog posts and trade journals, but don’t want to hire a dedicated consultant, Eugene Kim’s Blue Oxen Associates has a great answer: his Sensemaking Series is doing a series on Internet Identity. The series expert is my former XRI TC co-chair Gabe Wachob, who I can recommend hands down as knowing the space cold. Better yet, Gabe is famous for never hyping anything — he calls it just the way he sees it.

Plus the format – a set of four 90-minute sessions with a limit of five session attendees plus the expert – maximizes the information/effort ratio.

It’s a great design from two of the best people I know in the industry.

I made a long post about it when Bob first presented it at IIW and then the Burton Catalyst conference last June. Now anyone can get it here. See also Bob’s commentary on its evolution here.

Highly recommended for understanding the underlying dynamics of identity and relationship on the net.

Something else so good I just have to blog it: Eran Hammer-Lahav’s Discovery Coordination Report on the new metadata-discovery list he set up. Eran’s turning into a one-man hub of all things discovery as he drives forward together with the rest of the OASIS XRI TC towards the pushing out the new XRD 1.0 spec.

I have high hopes for this spec and Eran is one of the key reasons (plus the efforts of his co-editor Nat Sakimura of NRI, who is working OpenID miracles in Japan, and other new TC members who have joined to finally make simple, safe, uniform metadata discovery a reality on the Web).

I love this word — and it’s meaning — so much I just had to post this after David Recordon used it in an OpenID general list post and gave the following attribution.

Should be part of every techie’s daily vobulary. Watch out for bikeshedding!

For most people, watching the evolution of technical specifications is like watching a glacier move. To those of us living the process, though, there can be a great deal of drama to it — in fact it’s much more like climbing an icefall inside the glacier (anyone doubting how much adrenaline that takes should read John Krakauer’s description in Into Thin Air of climbing Mt. Everest’s Khumbu Icefall). For example, the failure of the OASIS Standard vote on the XRI 2.0 specifications last May — the first ever in 40+ OASIS Standard votes — was a watershed in the interaction of two standards bodies (W3C and OASIS).

The repercussions from that event have been equally unpredictable. Who would have thought that just four months later the XRI TC and W3C TAG would have rough consensus on how to resolve their differences? Or that the discussions would spill over to the much larger topic of uniform metadata discovery on the Web? Or that discovery could turn out to be the key to building identity into the browser? Or that interest in the XRDS discovery format would boil up enough to beget a new spec intended for uniform metadata discovery for any type of URI or XRI?

But that’s just what has happened. Two weeks ago at the Internet Identity Workshop, Eran Hammer-Lahav, author of the OAuth Discovery spec and founder of the XRDS-Simple list, led a marathon session on a new uniform metadata discovery specification to be called XRD 1.0. With 20 to 40 people in attendance all afternoon, Eran first ran through his exhaustively-researched blog post on HTTP and discovery, then through the proposed simplifications to the current XRDS/XRD schema. By the end there was rough consensus on XRD as a mechanism for uniform metadata discovery across all the different Internet identity and data sharing specs that need it (XRI, OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, XDI, Data Portability, etc.)

The name “XRD” is itself quite revealing of the evolutionary path to this point. When the OASIS XRI TC first developed the XML-based metadata discovery format we needed for XRI resolution back in 2003, we called it XRID (XRI Descriptor). We made it as simple and generalized as we could simply because any resource could have an XRI, so there was no telling what type of metadata might be needed over time. We focused primarily on one clear requirement: given input identifier x and service type y, define how to discover service endpoint URI z.

By 2005, when OpenID grew to the point of needing a discovery format, the authors of the Yadis (Yet Another Discovery spec) authors looked at XRID and saw something very close to what they needed. But XRID assumed you needed a sequence of descriptors corresponding to an XRI resolution chain. With OpenID a sequence wasn’t needed because an http(s) URI would have just one descriptor. So the XRI TC renamed the metadata format to XRD (Extensible Resource Descriptor) and created a separate XML wrapper element called XRDS (XRD Sequence) for cases like XRI resolution where you needed to wrap a sequence of XRDs.

However for cross-compatibility between XRI and OpenID, OpenID discovery just assumed the outer XRDS wrapper element even if it contained only one XRD. So the discovery format became widely known by the wrapper element, XRDS.

It wasn’t until Eran’s deep-dive on uniform metadata discovery that he recognized that the base case should be the other way around, i.e., for most URIs the the base discovery document should be an XRD, and only in cases like XRI resolution do you need the XRDS wrapper element.

Since the XRI TC had already made the decision in our next round of specs to split off XRDS from XRI Resolution, it was easy to just call this new specification XRD 1.0 (”1.0″ reflecting that it is the first standalone specification for XRD). However what we didn’t realize until the XRI TC F2F meeting the day after IIW was that XRD as both a metadata discovery format and protocol would be comprehensive enough that XRI 3.0 Resolution could become simply a “profile” of XRD 1.0 — and thus dramatically shorter.

We also didn’t realize how badly many different stakeholders want a Web-wide metadata discovery mechanism. Within a week after IIW we had six new people join the XRI TC to be part of the XRD work, and as of this writing nine more are in the queue.

So the roadmap of the next generation of XRI TC outputs is clear now. We will produce two OASIS Standard-track specifications:

• XRI 3.0 (including Syntax, Resolution, and Bindings) as a uniform syntax and resolution protocol for shared semantics across hierarchical URI schemes.
• XRD 1.0 for uniform metadata discovery for any URI or XRI.

Stay tuned for updates – hopefully this set of specs will set a glacier speed record.

Whenever I find myself recommending a book more than two or three times, it’s easier to just put a link here and point people at it. It’s definitely time to do that for Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist. It’s the second “you must read this” book recommended to me by Parity CEO Paul Trevithick (the last one was Made to Stick, which I also blogged about).

At last week’s Internet Identity Workshop I must have told a dozen people to read this book. It’s not that it’s filled with blazing insights about a notoriously inaccessible topic. It’s rather that the book patiently and carefully explains the real basics of RDF, RDFS, OWL, and the SemWeb using everyday examples that working developers and architects can wrap their heads around. It’s the most example-intensive technical book I’ve ever read, and when it comes to the SemWeb, I’m convinced that’s the right approach.

And one thing is for sure: you can’t read this book without coming away with a much deeper understanding of the power of the concept of inference, especially as it relates to the SemWeb.

I especially recommend this book to anyone interested in XRI and XDI — the former because one of of the strongest emerging use cases for XRI is sharing semantics across contexts, and the latter because XDI is a semantic protocol that uses XRIs to encode RDF statements (some of which can as filled with inferences as natural language statements).

Net net: if you’ve always wanted to understand the SemWeb but been afraid to try, treat yourself to this geek Christmas present.

I don’t think I’ve ever made a political post in this blog, but tonight is an exception.

We’ve never had an election like this. In my lifetime, I’ve never seen one man and his family and his campaign have such an impact on the direction of this country and this planet.

My wife and I were in tears watching Obama’s acceptance speech with our two sons. Just what it means to see Barack and Michelle and his daughters going to the White House – it’s a symbol to every last one of us of what is possible not just in this country but in every country.

It’s also a huge first step towards restoring our good name in the world.

It is a turning point for the 21st century? No one can say for sure. But I’m going to wake up tomorrow with more hope in my heart for my boy’s future than I have in a long time.

It’s now longer just Yes We Can.

It’s Now We Will.

Pam Dingle has a wonderful suggestion about how Firefox should proceed with automatic updates. Those of us building identity selector technology that integrates closely with browsers need stable browsers to work with. That’s always tough after a major release, but Pam’s suggestion makes sense.

I’m going to start referring to her as the Venn Queen. Eve Maler has done another Venn diagram, this time to show the relationship of whole areas of the “user-centric” sphere of activities. Going into Digital ID World next week, I’ll use this to help orient conversations around why there needs to be a simple, consistent way for users to control and manage identity and data sharing relationships no matter what site, application, or type of relationship is involved. We just need to build it! (hint: OpenID + relationship cards + XDI =

Whoever thought we’d be using blogs for vacation notices? But until we have real Internet-wide presence service, it seems much more sane than problem-prone email bounce-backs.

So count on me to be completely offline (and I mean completely) until August 4th. I’ll blog more on why when I return (in complete bliss).

Joe Andrieu nails another super post (where DOES he find the time to write/draw all of these???), this time about what it means for a platform to really be open.

My favorite part is that he doesn’t just do it in words — he does it in pictures, deliciously simple and understandable graphics that make it really clear what he means by “open platform”. In short, it’s the protocol, stupid!

Or as Joe puts it:

Level 4 platforms allow developers to build applications anywhere–on a website, on your desktop, even on your cell phone–and those applications can talk to any number of platform providers without restriction, using standard open protocols. Many of us have heard of the most successful protocols: SMTP, POP, HTTP, HTML, TCP/IP, RSS, but most users know these by the applications they enable: email, the World Wide Web, the Internet, blogs.

It’s the perfect message before the VRM Workshop starting tomorrow, and of course it’s exactly what we’re driving towards with XDI. One day I hope Joe can say the same thing about XDI – most users will never have heard of it or the dataweb model of data sharing, but they’ll know the application – VRM!