B. Mann Consulting

It was my great pleasure to meet the three guys from ClipperZ (The image is a little blurry, but that's because I had them shout "Identity 2.0" when I took the picture :P).

We sat down for several hours to discuss Identity 2.0 and some of their thoughts on blog owner centric vs. comment maker centric systems, talking mainly about SXORE (Marco has a post with SXORE feedback) and coComment. No comments from the SXORE team on that post, although Bryan Rieger found it. Go Vancouver people!

In any case, they are thinking about portable reputation (or maybe federated reputation would be a better phrase) as an initial application that can be built on top of Identity 2.0 systems. A reputation manager (a reputation provider? store?) would support multiple identity systems for authentication, and also share reputation with other reputation managers. This would initially be based on some very simple metrics, like perhaps whether or not a comment was approved, but certainly could support multiple other values (which gets quickly into a discussion about designing karma systems, perhaps, although it would depend on the feedback loops involved). Definitely subscribe to their blog if you want to keep up with what these guys are up to.

The other exciting thing I found was that here was a new "Web 2.0" style startup company based in Italy that had a lot more in common with Vancouver or San Francisco than anything else I had seen up to that point in Italy. We discussed the difficulties and benefits of a distributed team (although they are all in Italy, they live in different towns), and the usual roundup of tools -- they tried Basecamp but ended up using Trac, their user interaction diagrams are in OmniGraffle, we discussed Campfire vs. Skype bookmarked chats, or perhaps a Jabber multi-user chatroom.

It's nice to see such interesting things happening in Europe, and I have more of an interest in cross-pollination with European companies and clients than I do in jumping down into the scrum in Silicon Valley. I'm already scheming what the next European event will be: perhaps a BarCamp Brussels? Could be organized around Euro OSCON 2006 at the end of September 2006 (the Call for Participation deadline is March 6th).

I bumped into coComment finally. It's an interesting idea, almost identical in its end results to SXORE (which should be more officially launching this week, I think). But, the way it works and why you might want to use it is highly different.

coComment gives you a little "bookmarklet" to drag to your toolbar, and you click it whenever you see a comment box you want to leave a comment in. It sends your comment back to the central coComment server and you can of course track things via RSS and all that good stuff. The comment still lives in the original spot on the original blog...it just happens to be tracked centrally as well.

How is this different than SXORE? Well, at it's core, SXORE is based on identity, and could replace/augment the user login process of many types of systems. coComment is more of an overlay system, however at the end of the day it is tied to your coComment username, which is also an identity of sorts. What would be really interesting is if coComment actually begins SXIP-enabled -- that your coComment username is one of your identities, with which you could login to all sorts of things.