Webcasts from the MIT Media Lab

admin — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 01:10:33 +0000

There are links on Bob Sutor’s blog to the webcasts from the Virtual Worlds: Where Business, Society, Technology & Policy Converge Conference, presented by IBM and the MIT Media Lab in June of this year. There are some interesting thoughts on how virtual worlds will change how we think of identity in the future.

While digging around on the Media Lab site I also discovered webcasts from the h2.0: new minds, new bodies, new identities symposium held on 09 May. There hasn’t been time yet to listen to them but I’m very intrigued by the description:

“A one-day symposium exploring the innovative research focused on human 2.0—the new science of human adaptability, hosted by John Hockenberry.”

community, education, identity, learning, muve, secondlife, virtual, webcast, world

Today OpenID, Tomorrow …?

admin — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 01:56:07 +0000

I have an OpenID and use it wherever possible - though it isn’t always
that much. In fact, I’m surprised that the boom of Web2.0 applications
has not seen wider adoption of identity management mechanisms.

Today CommonCraft posted some concise thoughts on OpenID and what wide adoption would mean for online communities. Two projections for the future really stand out to me:

“More Lurker Conversion? On a lot of community sites,
registration is a barrier to participation. Lurkers are often
unregistered. There will always be a high proportion of lurkers, but
OpenID could lower the registration barrier enough to bring new people
into the fray”.

“More Incentives for Good Behavior? Reputation is a big deal
online, either implicit (name recognition) or explicit (ebay rating).
If OpenID increases the portability of reputation, people may be
motivated (and rewarded) to build a positive reputation across sites”.

More conversation sounds fantastic to me, and I wholeheartedly agree with this projection simply because I hate registering to comment on a blog, and love when I can use my TypeKey ID or Google ID (in the case of Blogger). Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to use my OpenID?

Evaluating online reputation will become more of a necessity the more connected we all become, along with the increasing frequency in which we participate in computer-mediated interactions. It is a vital skill that we all need to learn if we haven’t already, and that our children need to learn as well. I’m all for tools that help usget to that end. It would be interesting to see it tied to more services like Opinity - though I admittedly do not spend too much time actively developing my reputation on that service, and wish it was possible to hook more services into it. It is a step in the right direction though.

community, identity, technology

Understanding Virtual Worlds » identity

Webcasts from the MIT Media Lab

Today OpenID, Tomorrow …?