Inchoate Curmudgeon

Following up on the post today regarding anonymity and yesterday’s post regarding integration issues in Web 2.0, I stumbled across an entry titled “Social Networking 3.0” on Henry Story’s Blog, The Sun Bablefish Blog, regarding the silos the various Web 2.0 applications and services are forming. Henry’s area of interest is focused on identity issues, web ontologies and on some of the related technical mechanisms such as RDF.

Henry followed this post several days ago with a deeper look at some mechanisms which may provide some of the essential mechanisms for creating a “web of trust”. This is basically a way for baseing policy decisions on authenticated membership in a collaboration group or “web” of individuals you know and trust. “[it] is easy to see how I can use the wot ontology to sign other files, link to my friends public signatures, sign their public signatures, how they could sign mine, etc, etc. and thereby create a cryptographically enhanced Web of Trust built on [decentralized] identity.”

This is the technical equivalent of a typical social trust mechanism, “I know you and you know Jill, so I know Jill by association.” The FOAF ontology acronym stands for “Friend of a Friend.”

I like the idea of this distributed trust mechanism a lot better than trusting someones identity simply because some faceless commercial entity says they are who they say they are. Besides, I know where my friend lives if he leads me astray regarding Jill.

I also like the distributed nature of the approach for architectural reasons: unless I’m a really lonely guy, you are likely to be able to verify I am who I say I am from more than one source. The mechanisms eliminate the single point of failure introduced by a single, monolithic authentication service.

Although the mechanics of this don’t look very easy to me yet, I can see how these mechanisms could be implemented as fully automated plugins in someone’s various web personae, such as their blogs and websites. If the various social networking sites would cooperate, fairly secure, comprehensive overlapping webs of trust would seem to be a very practical possibility.

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