Check out my piece at ReadWriteWeb on the recent announcement of collaboration between Microsoft and OpenID.

(Thanks Richard for great job formatting it.)

Check out this interesting piece from ocean@concedere…

But everybody does understand the concept of a community, and belonging to a community, and they would understand that such a membership would grant certain privileges.

Membership is, I think, a far more interesting and useful concept than identity. It’s also one which is much less prone to abuse and much more unlikely to exhibit control. Rather than trying to cook up identity scheme after identity scheme people ought to focus on working with the many communities that already exist on the web to capture the value of these memberships.

I tend to agree with his take on the importance of associations as opposed to a standalone identity in human networks. The issue though is weather it is possible to have relevant and useful associations in an environment, like the Internet, where it is impossible, even for serious participants, to establish their identity.