ReadWriteWeb

Last week, I attended the Internet Identity Workshop. Doc Searls, one of the organizers of the conference, ran multiple sessions on a concept he has been developing with others in his role as a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, called Vendor Relation Management (or VRM.) The concept behind VRM is to "provide customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties."

According to Doc, he originally starting thinking about the idea after a conversation with his wife discussing why she couldn't "take her shopping cart with her across different sites." While at first this seems like an odd request, because we're used to thinking about the site driving the transaction, interestingly when the transaction drives the site it becomes a provocative question. This is why VRM is often characterized as conceptually the inverse of CRM systems.

Last week, I attended the Internet Identity Workshop. As an attendee with less exposure to the user centric identity, an early session provided an great overview of how the pieces fit together. This is a regular topic at the IIW and I'm sure the community will continue collaborating online at the Identity Commons wiki page. However, the image below captures the map as discussed during our session.

Written by Jitendra Gupta of Karmaweb and edited by Richard MacManus

Bill Gates of Microsoft just announced a deal with Jan Rain, VeriSign and Sxip to develop integration between Microsoft CardSpace and the open source project, OpenID. This is an interesting deal between the software giant in Redmond and a popular open source project, which deservers a closer look. For those already familiar with OpenID and Microsoft, jump directly to the takeaway section. For others, the next two sections will provide you with a quick introduction to two new technologies that will likely have a significant impact on the future of Internet.

What is OpenID

OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. It is aimed at solving the problem of Web single sign-on. How does the problem of web single sign-on affect you? Well, if you struggle with keeping track of different usernames and passwords at different websites where you have an account, OpenID can help you. With OpenID you will be assigned a standard username (typically a URL or an i-name, similar to an email address) that you can use on all sites that support OpenID. 

In this week's R/WW poll, we're asking whether you ever fake your Web identity - or even just part of it. Note that this doesn't count times when you are anonymous on the Web (such as almost all snarky blog comments). We're specifically asking about the times when you use an identity - e.g. online dating, peer-to-peer transactions sites such as craigslist or ebay, social networking sites like MySpace and Second Life.

See Jitendra Gupta's post today, Nobody Knows You're A Dog 2.0, for more on this topic.