2 posts from July 2006

Digital Identity

(First posted September 2005 on Bloglines)

The viability of the long tail - and thus services like Amazon, depends on the ability of people to navigate their way from popular services to niche ones without being paralysed by choice. This can be done in many different ways. Some involve recommendations from friends either offline or on blogs or through email or social networking services. However Google and Amazon (and others) use algorithms which say "you clicked on/typed this, thus you might like that" to enable people to travel down the tail to more obscure content.

There are two ways in which this is a problem. First, the recommendations are too broad. They don’t let people compartmentalise their lives; to keep their fun separate from their serious pursuits. Second, they can be invasive and can stop people feeling secure and in control of how their information is being used.

Users like it when they can take control of their digital footprints. If you give people some agency and investment in the process they tend to respond well. Witness the difference in the reception given to Amazon where users can create their own wishlist and Gmail which reads your email automatically. The former was hailed as useful and fun while the latter was branded an invasion of privacy.

Search and e-commerce services should enable users to have at least 4 digital identities with different levels of privacy. Their professional ID, their personal ID, their private ID, and a non-traceable ID. This should be built into the service such that if a service provider like Amazon or Google is saving information from clickstreams, that information will be linked to that particular ID.

Benefits:

• Reflects how people are aspirational - who we are, how we see ourselves and how others see us are three different things. This allows the info that we want out to get out, while quarantining things we find embarrassing.
• Enables people to feel empowered, not violated.
• More accurate results – the ID being used is another set of metadata for the search engine or e-commerce site to use. A person whose professional ID is full of medical clickstreams is more likely to want medical stuff when using their professional ID.

Challenges:

The idea of a unified method of aggregating the various different ID’s on the many online services is required. This is the subject of Dick Hardt’s presentation which is attached to this post.

Update: 25^th July 2006

It is great to see that user content driven services like flickr, vox and videoegg are allowing people to set different levels of privacy on their content.

Two articles about Iran:

• From the Economist.
• From the Lowy Institute.

Indicators from inside Iran:

• Ayatollah Ali Khamenei likes remind the US that should they make a “mistake” with regard to Iran, “energy flow through this region will be seriously in danger.”
• President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has become a rockstar in the Muslim world by standing up to the US and has somewhat isolated the pragmatists and Bazaaris in the Iranian regime.
• The Iranian military have conducted exercises in the Strait of Hormuz which is the passage through which most oil is transported from the region.

It’s a crazy world we’re livin’ in:

• International Atomic Energy Agency demands that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment activities.
• Chapter VII resolutions are being debated in the Security Council.
• Russia and China are resisting the invocation of Chapter VII.
• The EU is continuing to provide incentives for compliance.
• The US will probably push for sanctions.
• Should sanctions fail, air strikes and military options are more likely.

What would the effect be?

• Iran is the 4^th largest producer of oil in the world (3% of the world’s oil).
• About ¼ of the world’s oil flows through the region.
• Other oil producing areas are not poised to pick up the slack – only Saudi Arabia has significant reserves and most of them are in heavy sour crude while global demand is mostly for sweet light crude.
• A World Bank simulation estimated that a sustained loss of 2million bpd would see a 1.5% decrease in global GDP.

Demand and Supply

• We’ve already had a prolonged oil ‘shock’ – it was $10/barrel in 99 and is now over $70/barrel and we’re still seeing global growth – so what’s the problem?
• The increase in price has primarily been driven by increased demand from growing economies like China and India.
• According to the Lowy Institute article, supply shortage is a different and much more damaging story.
• While this is not very well explained in the article, I imagine that it is because increases in price due to demand came bundled with increased demand for products and services from the US and around the world (eg steel from Australia).
• Increases in price due to supply shortages won't have any of these ancillary benefits.

Would Iran do it?

• There is evidence that Iran is conflicted about using oil as a tool for foreign policy.
• Lobbing in the occasional rhetorical grenade helps keep the price of oil high.
• Oil earnings account for 80% of Iran’s total exports and 40% of the government budget.
• Iran has an ‘Oil Stabilisation Fund’ that has been built up to 20billion.
• However disrupting the oil flow would be a last resort as it would weaken the grip of the regime over the populace.