Warm weather comes again to the midwest, and how energizing it is!

MicroID has been tremendous, incredible discussions and a lot of traction, I'm really looking forward to the implications in the future as more apps start to support it and hopefully it may help evolve online reputation systems.

On a personal note, my wife Lis and I are taking our first "real" vacation in 10 years of marriage for a full week next week. The geek in me is wondering how I'll survive being disconnected for that long, everything will be different when I come back :)

Unrelated, I've picked up this (bad) habit for just registering domain names when I find neat-sounding available ones (because they're so rare!). Last week I snagged fibbery and while I have no time to do anything really fun with it, I love the idea of a new breed of simple poetry, so if it takes off, maybe I'll make a nice little social/wiki portal-ish site out of it... as if I have time.

The last little mention is that it was my birthday last week, yay for being older. Had a really good time going out with a bunch of friends and family, it's moments like those...

Oh, I had this really weird UI alternative idea for something that kinda sorta resembles a web chat system. What happened to all my time I used to spend toying with ideas? Perhaps there never was any!

MicroID - Small Decentralized Verifiable Identity

One of the best ways to lay claim to your food as a kid is to lick it, make sure that your sibling or peers know it's yours. Well, MicroIDs are a bit like that in the digital world, you can stamp a MicroID on your content, sites, and individual pages. A hosted service or member site can include MicroIDs on every participants profile, comments, content, ratings, microformats, or anything. Then these can be independently verified and even aggregated into third party services (anonymously and without any loss of privacy to boot).

It's a very very simple solution from a computing, protocol, and technology perspective, it's almost too simple since many geeks almost immediately dismiss it without understanding the beauty of it's function. The most exciting aspect is that it empowers end users with absolute control while fully protecting their rights and privacy. It's also the model of decentralized systems, allowing anyone to participate and enabling services to crawl and index and provide a fully anonymous utility. All of this is critical for anything relating to Identity on the net.

As far as Identity systems go, MicroID is not a system nor can you compare it to any of them. MicroID is just a utility that any of them can employ, it's simply a mechanism for safely attributing ownership using any (URI based) communication identifier.

Right now I'm just looking to get a wider audience to provide some feedback on it, anyone you think might be interested please pass it along. I simply hope to see this become something useful for anyone to utilize.

Look what slipped past the spam filters just now, I found it very entertaining, but I'm different like that :)



Speaking of spam... am I the only one that still gets it (and hates it)?

In case anyone forgot, today is 3.14 day, Pi day. In celebration I made a super simple "fan site" for our favourite number today:

3.1four.com

It's my hope to actually have a little AJAX and Web 2.0 fun with this site someday, allowing people to socialize around places in Pi, browse dynamically, tag, maybe even have an API and do some mashups.... but today it stands plain and tall in honor of the symmetry and beauty of our mathematical universe, Pi.

I ran across this interesting visual+writeup recently and it struck me as close, but not exactly aligning with my experiences.

I'm not a numerologist, but I love to play with numbers and stats when given the chance, and "back in the day" when interacting with a large variety of groups of individuals while working on jabber I had many of those opportunities.

My experience was repeatedly showing the power of seven, and it sticks out in my head since it was a bit suspicious. Say your going to send out an announcement to a mailing list with 1000 people on it and it had a URL in it, around 150 would view it. Say that page had a download on it, or a form, or something that required more interaction, you might get 20 to take that step. Ultimately you'd get only a couple people that might reply or email you personally following up.

This wasn't just in mailing list postings, I experienced it with updates to the home page, source code checkins, and even the size of the community had clear layers that reflected the power of 7: if we had 5 core contributers, there were 30-40 people that would respond or play with stuff (active followers), a few hundred that would read updates or subscribe to news (passive followers), and the last layer of maybe 2000 was passerbys and users. Those relationships stayed fairly consistent as each layer grew.

Perhaps this could be generalized into some kind of mental commitment buckets that people naturally create: personal, interested, curious, fleeting. Each one having a different social or internal set of responses, with varying levels of assumed responsibility. If so, why would the relationships between them be so consistent? I can only venture to guess that it has to do with manageability and communication.

I'm pretty confident in saying that in general seven or fewer people can work well as an unstructured group, but to increase the participants you introduce structure and layers. It would follow naturally to see that a group of 50 would be the largest you could have with only two layers, seven groups and seven leaders, and to take the next step would require yet another layer, and so on... I'm quite sure someone has numbers on this for management charts in big companies (or any larger organization) and it'd be fun to see how close to the power 7 they are.

Summing this all up in a way that sounds funny: based on the readily available communication tools and apparent size of each layer, new parties may subconsciously select a level of participation in any organization.

Update: thanks to stpeter, good pointer with some mentions of 7