Arbitrage

Terms Most Useful in Describing Creative Works of Art

Thrown in as part of the Magritte exhibit currently showing at LACMA, this painting by John Baldessari (sorry for the partial reproduction):

Be Indispenseable (Way Off Topic)

Just leafing through the archive on Guy Kawasaki's blog and I came across this post:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/04/a_poem_for_all_.html

Key excerpt from the poem Guy cites:

Take a bucket and fill it with water,
Put your hand in it up to the wrist,
Pull it out and the hole that's remaining
Is a measure of how you will be missed.

This is a well known analogy and the point of Guy's post is that everyone is dispensable/replaceable and therefore we should maintain Humility. While I think Humility is a primary virtue, as do the many commenters on Guy's blog, this poem could not be more out of synch with the way human beings really operate.

Think for a moment of all of the people that you have learned from in your life.

If you are anything like me there is a long list of family, friends, teachers, professors, colleagues, bosses, musicians, authors, bloggers, mentors, etc, who have contributed to your life in significant ways. Are they dispensable? Would their disappearance from your life leave no impact?  If they had never been a part of your life, would you be a different person?

Why write or cite a poem that diminishes the very real contributions we all make, and/or have the potential to make, to each other?

Was Robert Kennedy dispensable/replaceable? or Barry Goldwater (included for political balance)? or John Lennon? or Bob Marley? or Gandhi? Have they been missed? I would argue that they (and the contributions they made to shaping the world) have been missed to a profound extent.

The water in the bucket analogy is blind to the profound impact human beings can have on one  another. Whether they are family or friends or artists - the people around you help you and guide your views in significant ways every day. To say they would not be missed is just flat out wrong.

Each of us plays the role of  a family member, friend, colleague, teacher, parent, mentor, etc. for the people that surround us.  In that context, Humility is not an end in and of itself. Humility is only a virtue in that it allows us to be open and generous enough to have a positive affect on the lives of those around us...and so, in being humble, we can make ourselves truly indispensable. Seems like a better use of poem writing effort would be to create images and analogies that elevate the impact we have on each other, not diminish it.

Now back to regularly scheduled programming....

Privacy Generation Gap

Interesting cover story in last weeks NY Magazine (01/12/07) describing the encroaching death of privacy.  Excerpt:

Kids are using the Internet to create records of their lives so permanent and personal it makes even some twentysomethings feel like they’re on the wrong side of a generation gap. But the MySpacers are the ones adjusting constructively to a phenomenon that affects us all—the inevitable death of privacy.

Couple of thoughts, (1) Most of the participants in the identity/privacy conversations are probably on the plus side of the generation gap and (2) Selective user control of personal attributes kind of goes out the window in a world where "digital identity" is conveyed in video.

Taxonomy Revisted - Enter the Pickup Truck

With all of the euphoria surrounding the recently announced "convergence" between OpenID and Cardspace, I thought this would be a good time to revisit a taxonomy I created two years ago.  Although I did not intend to be controversial, I drew some of flack for assigning LID the role of a unicycle in my taxonomy.

Now two years later, LID has become a subset of YADIS, YADIS has merged with OpenID, and OpenID will be supported within Cardspace nee Infocards. (Also, Liberty and SAML became one.) Where does this evolution leave the transportation taxonomy?

Cardspace had not yet been announced at the time I posted my original taxonomy. When it was announced as Infocards I worried that it might become the Segway of identity (my worry was based on the inner circle hype that accompanied its rumored existence.) Thankfully, Cardspace has developed, under Kim's guidance, into the motor vehicle of identity - I am placing it into my taxonomy as the Pickup Truck. The Pickup Truck is versatile, it is useful for both work and entertainment and it is fairly straightforward to operate for the average driver. These are all characteristics that map pretty neatly to the form and function Cardspace provides in the identity world.

As for the "convergence" between OpenID and Cardspace, I still view OpenID as a Unicycle relative to other methods of porting identity across security domains.  Unicycles are fun and for a small subset of transportation needs they serve a well defined purpose. Such as riding around in your driveway juggling oranges...but if I put a Unicycle in the back of a Pickup Truck when I  go to the grocery store to buy those oranges,  does that represent convergence between the Unicycle and the Pickup Truck? Does that give the Unicycle a role in the grocery hauling task? I say no. Similarly, OpenId will play a limited role in making identities portable - primarily for fun stuff. Whether on its own or as part of Cardspace, OpenID will remain use limited.

Despite what some in the OpenID community would believe, the Unicycle is not all that pejorative a metaphor and the taxonomy is not a hierarchy. I originally created it as a fun way to classify identity systems and to better organize the conversation around where different approaches to portable identity best fit and I think it still serves that purpose.

Also, as a longtime employee of the only company that has developed code supporting all three versions of SAML, WS-Federation, SPML, Cardspace, and OpenID, I have no vested interest in taking sides. In fact, Vive le difference! Vive le Pickup Truck! and long live the Unicycle too.