Doc Searls closed opening day at the Internet Identity Workshop with a little bit of its history, and why he became personally involved:
Searls co-wrote a rant in 1999 called the The Cluetrain Manifesto. He's a "marketer galvanized against marketing," and believes that network markets can be smarter than companies or governments can. Though the Internet delivers more power to the customer, many suppliers don't realize how much more powerful their customer has become. At the same time, money keeps flowing to the supply side, and market power goes to the big pyramids with the most eyeballs on top. (This was a colorful visual, but Searls didn't take it much further than this...I just couldn't excise the visual of big pyramids dripping in eyeballs.)
In 2001, the Jabber project was started - and as Searls puts it, everything came down to identity. Control over identity is how individuals become fully empowered consumers. Searls provided a use case of going on holiday as a member of many travel affinity groups. e.g., if I belong to ten frequent-flyer clubs, who will provide me with the best deal? Searls wanted the market to come to him with the best offer, but didn't see it happening.
Since that time, Searls had given up on Identity...and then he met Kaliya Hamlin. Though he had always believed that this problem could only be solved at the individual level, he hadn't seen the Commons concept being implemented. Once Searls met with some of the other people focused on this issue (long list of folks like Windley, Gillmor, etc.), he was galvanized by the energy around the issue and became very re-focused upon it.
Searls also called out that the formal theme at this year's O'Reilly Etech - the Attention Economy - was still all about eyeballs and advertising. (Well, this isn't entirely true...I have notes from many sessions that weren't.) But what about when there isn't any advertising? What about the customer that is completely independent of an ad-supported environment? Searls' model of a marketplace has three parts: transactions, conversations, and relationships. Most people pay attention to the transactional aspect, but "the relationship part is where we need to work stuff out."
As for now, Searls asks: How do we structure the attention-based economy that involves identity? Maybe it's like Creative Commons, where we provide a formal structure for the casual relationship between people who create art, and those who consume it on the other end. Everyone has to be clear with their intentions. Clarity of intent, and a skeleton structure to hang it on, might be the right model for an attention-based economy with fully independent customers. We've yet to see.
Tags: christine herron christine.net space jockeys identity iiw2006 doc searls technology
