I’m intrigued with the concept of Reputation as it relates to Identity. Two days ago, I posted a tongue-in-cheek series of pictures that addressed the subject, and last December discussed Reputation as a component of my Identity Map structure. Today, Johannes Ernst’s blog led me to Phil Windley’s blog, which linked to a set of slides from a presentation Phil gave at Yahoo.

Johannes summarized Phil’s pertinent definitions as:

• Identity is my story about me.
• Reputation is your story about me.

So, if Identity is a story told by a person about himself, and Reputation is a story about that person by a third party, Authentication happens when the Identity Story and the Reputation Story match. I suppose the strength of authentication is proportional to the precision of the match.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management,
Reputation