To my friend Mark MacAuley, who asks the question, “Is the Sun setting on IdM?”. May I offer the quotations of two famous people in American history:

Mark Twain: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

Al Jolson: “You ain’t heard nothing yet!”

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management,
Sun Microsystems

Amateur: “One who engages in a pursuit, study, science, or sport as a pastime rather than as a profession. From from Latin amator lover, from amare to love.”

As I reported last Friday, I am listening to Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, on my iPod. It was interesting to hear Chris speak about the Wikipedia phenomena, where a vast group of amateurs created the largest encyclopedia in the world – truly a long-tail phenomena. He pointed out that Wikipedia content is “living” as opposed to the “static” content in a traditional encyclopedia, and that Wikipedia was produced by amateurs, rather than the professionals who created the encyclopedias we grew up with.

Living content produced by amateurs vs. static content produced by professionals. This sounds like the Participation Age to me.

The big question remains for Wikipedia, and many other cyber publishers of long tailed content produced by amateurs “for the love of it:” How do those who create and operate the infrastructure of the Participation Age monetize this phenomena so dominated by amateurs? Where is the economic value?

For Sun Micrsosystems, which has committed to a Long Tail open source software strategy and which produces infrastructure for Long Tail economy companies, economic prosperity depends on answering that question in new and innovative ways.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
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Participation Age

Last Friday, I posted a bit on the Long Tail market phenomena. I arose Saturday morning with notices in my inbox that I had received 8 comments to that post. “A record-breaking day,” I told myself.

But alas, only two comments were legitimate. The remaining six were spam – long lists of URLs posted in English and Chinese. Yet another symptom of long tail economics – where the cost of distribution is so low that some bozo in China can reach across the miles and irritate me, all without sharing his name. Anonymous Identity, indeed!

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management,
The Long Tail

My Dad taught me the truism, “Keep your eyes and ears open and you’ll learn something new every day.”

Today, I learned a new word, “Marketroid,” courtesy of Martin Hardee, who commented on yesterday’s post.

Answers.com defines Marketroid as “marketing slime, marketeer, mar�ket�ing droid, marketdroid. A member of a company’s marketing department, esp. one who promises users that the next version of a product will have features that are not actually scheduled for inclusion, are extremely difficult to implement, and/or are in violation of the laws of physics; and/or one who describes existing features (and misfeatures) in ebullient, buzzword-laden adspeak. Derogatory. Compare droid.”

I’ve met some of those folks in my day, present company to be excluded, I’m sure.

I wonder what attributes marketroids have attached to their Identities?

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management,
Marketing

For my recent birthday, two of my inspired children gave me a subscription to Audible.com, an online audio book vendor. I have thoroughly enjoyed the ability to listen to a good book as I have travelled thither and yon in rental cars and taxicabs.

The first title I downloaded to my iPod, of the the more than 35,000 titles available, was The Long Tail – Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, by Chris Anderson. This book explores “The Long Tail,” a term coined by Mr. Anderson to describe the phenomena where in an economy of abundance, with very large product choice and low distribution costs (e.g. online music sales), a large portion of the economic value of the market lies not just in a relatively few megahits, but in the long tail of a demand curve, represented by the yellow “long tail” shown in the diagram above.

Long-tailed examples are all around us. The fact that I was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles listening to the Long Tail on my iPod rather than listening to the radio is a long tail market symptom. The fact that you are reading this blog (which is definitely in the long tail of the blogosphere) rather than reading your local newspaper, demonstrates both the vast choice available to information consumers and the ease of distributing ideas.

It occured to me that Identity suddenly becomes very relevant in a long tail economy. If an enterprise sells only megahits, or very popular items, it can apply its entire marketing budget to delivering a “megahit” message to the masses. But in a long tail economy, an consumer’s tastes, product preferences and buying patterns suddenly become critical. Marketing messages can no longer be general; they must be tailored to the individual. This high degree of personalization demands Identity – which in the broad sense is much more than user name, password and mailing address. It includes preference and presence, history and reputation. This composite Identity of a consumer suddenly becomes an extremely valuable asset.

In the modern telecommunications market I serve, our customers are definitely competing for prominence in the long tail economy. A telecom carrier or cable operator’s desire to deliver highly personalized, blended services, fueled by individually-targeted advertising, must learn to leverage Identity for fundamental business advantage.

Do you like to be thought of as a valuable asset to be leveraged? Maybe not. However, as a participant in the long tail economy, you are no longer one of a numberless mass. You are an individual, with individual preferences. And long tail marketeers are trying to reach you. Such a pleasant thought!

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
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The Long Tail

I am pleased to report that Craig Ellis, my new colleague in Sun’s OEM sales organization, is my 500th LinkedIn connection! My last 100 connections have been added in about 5 months, since October 13, 2006.

Thanks, Craig, for your connection!

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
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LinkedIn

Yesterday, I learned about the Identity Landscape project from Gerald Beuchelt of Sun. The goal of this project, which exists under the OpenLiberty.org umbrella, is “providing an overview and a ‘map’ to the emerging identity landscape. In order to achieve this, we develop a system to classify and evaluate existing identity systems and emerging technology. Based on these findings, we discuss policy, business, and regulatory ramifications of a decision for or against a particular identity system or technology.”

I look forward to participating with Gerald and his colleagues in this project.

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Digital Identity,
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Open Liberty

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Kansas preparing my presentation for the JavaOne conference. Terry Sigle and I will double-team the Java University session entitled, “Digital Identity Trends and How to Realize Rapid RBAC Deployment.”

This project began on a small scale in January, but gained momentum in February, when I was invited to speak at JavaOne. Thanks to the many of you who have sent me your thoughts about important trends in the Digital Identity industry. If you would still like to have your insights included in my study and your name mentioned in my bibliograply, please respond to this post or drop me an email.

We hope to see you at JavaOne!

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Leverage: “power or ability to act or to influence people, events or decisions.”

Our friends of the VRM mindset might not agree, but I think the greatest assets large service providers have are the large repositories of identity information about their customers and the accompanying business relationship with those customers. A few months ago, one of Sun’s customers passed the threshold of 100 million entries in their customer directory. Another customer has asked us for advice on leveraging an existing user population that exceeds 200 million. We recently completed a successful benchmark for over 400 million entries in a directory for yet another customer.

The word of the day is scale – and lots of it. The challenge of the day is how to deliver compelling services to all those folks in a way that they are happy and the service provider is happy. That is leverage in every sense of the word.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management

On March 6th (I’m a bit slow), Sun announced the availability of the its Identity-Enabled Business-to-Business (B2B) solution. This solution integrates Sun’s Identity Management and Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS) products to ensure ensure safe policy and transaction synchronization across multiple B2B projects.

What intrigues me about this announcement is that we are beginning to see a fundamental trend in Identity Management — tightly integrating Identity Management with other technologies to yield composite services that enable new business models. Call it “Identity Enabled Business.”

Note: The photo above has nothing to do with Identity Enabled Business, but I thought it would be nice to put in a plug for my home state of Arizona by introducing you to one of our friendly Arizona television stations.

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Java CAPS,
B2B