Business and Blogging

Managing Identity in a Web 2.0 World - Part 1: The Challenge

by Des Walsh on July 29th, 2007

This is the first of two posts on the subject of managing our identities - and the identities of our companies - in a Web 2.0 world. This post looks at the challenge.

It is said that Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin Look-Alike competition in Monte Carlo, Monaco. He came third.

More recently, noted blogger Chris Pirillo had his identity “kidnapped” on social networking site Pownce.

As we welcome and delight in all the possibilities of the new world of online social networking, we need to recognize that for many people the sheer number and variety of social networking sites and tools can be quite overwhelming.

And any serious business strategy around blogging and social networking has to come up with some good answers for questions about how the identities of individuals (and companies) are presented online, how those identities can be misrepresented and how they can be kept “intact” and updated accurately.

However sophisticated the technology, managing our respective identities in a Web 2.0 world requires some vigilance and self-help.

Respected Web strategist Jeremiah Owyang says we need a “single, trusted and protected identity system“.

He notes that Open ID is supposed to provide that solution but acknowledges that, as I for one can attest, the Open ID system while wonderfully logical, has a geekiness about it that makes it a hard sell for a mass market. (And after writing that sentence I went to look for the OpenID identity I registered when I first found out about the system, but could not find any information about it on my computer or in the notebook I keep with various usernames and such!)

Jeremiah says:

We need a system that we can all trust where we own and can confirm our data and profile information, can control different privacy permissions within our network (friends, family, work, other) and give us the ability to remove, export or delete it.

My LinkedIn Bloggers colleague Dennis McDonald is not sure about Jeremiah’s proposal. In “Do We Need ‘Portable Relationship Maps’ for Social Networks?” he questions the feasibility of establishing a standardized way of mapping our social relationships. He would not like to see “a standardization effort emerge that might thwart the ability of networks to compete on different features and benefits that center around relationships”.

Much as I would like a simpler system, I am inclined at this stage to agree with Dennis.

The next post in this two part series gives an example of steps we can take to manage and safeguard our own online identity.

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POSTED IN: Branding, Corporate, Enterprise 2.0, General, Resources, Risk Management, Search, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0