All Identity Is Divided Into Three Parts
In May of 2007, I discovered that Chinese, unlike English, does not use the same word to mean “identity” in both the “card” sense and the “crisis” sense. Those are indeed two different things.
The early days of the free software movement were plagued by a similar ambiguity of the English word “free” until the gratis...
Cool URIs are Galenic
Paul Madsen, inspired by the popularity of fourfold classifications in ancient Greek philosophy (the four elements, the four humors, etc.) today proposes a “four humors” theory of identifiers:
What are an identifier’s ‘humours’? How about linkability, discoverability, uniquenessability, and memorability?
I’ve been pondering a fourfold theory of my own lately, which is that identity’s role in distributed...
Identity Lessons in Literature
One of my favorite sections of the OECD’s new working paper on digital identity titled “At a Crossroads: ‘Personhood’ and Digital Identity in the Information Society,” which I discovered via Paul and Kaliya, is the sidebar on page 11 titled “Identity Lessons in Literature.” It begins:
Novelists and dramatists have driven Locke’s points home over and...
Facebook and Mimetic Desire
The Guardian has outdone itself today. I had already guessed that Facebook is “some kind of extension of the American imperialist programme,” (duh!) but the connection to René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire had completely escaped me:
Thiel’s philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University, proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic...
The Internet of Things
Kevin Kelly has a terrific post up on his blog about the Giant Global Graph. In the most comprehensive discussion of Tim Berners-Lee’s recent “computers to documents to data” formulation I’ve seen yet, Kelly demonstrates the sympathy necessary to understand but also the clarity necessary to criticize:
Documents and computers as property are a lot less...
First III, then WWW, now GGG
Tim Berners-Lee explains that digital identity is really about the WWW’s emerging successor, the GGG:
I called this graph the Semantic Web, but maybe it should have been Giant Global Graph! Any worse than WWWW? Now that the “Semantic Web” term has been established for a long time, I’m not proposing to change it. But let’s...
Ruby XRI Resolver and API Released
Victor Grey and I today announced the first release of barx, an open source XRI resolver and API implemented in Ruby. For the full story I refer you to Victor’s announcement here and here, and also to barx’s home page at xrisoft.org.
Thanks to Drummond Reed for his enthusiastic support. I’d also like to thank David...
She-Geeks of the World, Unite!
I attended a Ruby meetup the other night. There was standing room only; the organizers estimated that over 50 attended.
From time to time, I looked around the room to see how many women were in the audience. Guess how many I saw? Zero. Yech.
Why does this happen? Men don’t like it. Women don’t like it....
Sacred Zones
A news item that appeared on American newswires today has led me to think in a new way about identity, both digital and otherwise. The first few paragraphs:
BLANCHARD, Mich. — Some Amish farmers say a state requirement that they tag cattle with electronic chips is a violation of their religious beliefs.
Last year, the state Department...
It’s Not Easy Being Memed
Oh, no. Eugene Eric Kim has tagged me with the infamous “random facts” meme.
Fortunately, he has softened the blow with kind words, and especially so by placing me among illustrious company including digital identity’s own Pamela Dingle.
It wouldn’t be a meme if there weren’t something to repeat verbatim, and in this case it’s the Rules...
