Manage your online identity.

As part of a contest over at Marketing Pilgrim, Ben Wills has submitted an article entitled “The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing.” He names the five pillars and gives example sites for each.

The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing

Any and all forms of Social Media Marketing tactics fall under at least one of these five forms of action. Often the same channel will incorporate two or more of these:

1. Declaration of Identity
2. Identity through Association
3. User-initiated Conversation
4. Provider-initiated Conversation
5. In-Person Interaction

ClaimID is listed squarely under #1.

I’d like to take this moment to argue that because claimID is a URL-based service, it has a foothold into #2-#5 as well. ClaimID helps people find people and helps disambiguate individuals in a medium that flattens so much rich real-world information.

Conversations are held between at least two entities. ClaimID allows you to better define who you are at one end of those conversations. And conversations are a critical part of all 5 of the pillars listed above.

As a computer mediated environment, the web has been a great liberator of information but also a great equalizer, for better and worse. We have incredible access to those who we may never have had access to talk with before – but we also have the challenge of identification and verification, since everyone can be reduced to an email address or pseudonym.

Navigating this space is hard – and new. We’ll look back on these days and chuckle at how silly we seem with our web browsers and ‘desktop’ computers. What will continue, however, is URL-based identification schemes and conversations between people. And we’ve got both.

We’re pleased to be part of a pillar.

Some good news from the OpenID world – blog search engine Technorati has adopted OpenID.  This means that if your blogging platform supports OpenID, you can use your login to claim your blog in Technorati.  Sure, this is a small step – but it is a small step that has consequence because of its scale.

The idea of using a decentralized identity system to make claims between services is very useful – and it is something we’ve been working on since very early in ClaimID’s development.  As more of our identity goes online, it makes sense that we are going to want to claim some of this identity.  To address this, we have OpenID and MicroID.

We’re very excited by this news.  We’re also really excited by the news that both del.icio.us and Last.fm are now supporting MicroID.  These forward-thinking services understand the value of claiming identity – and we’re very happy they have adopted open formats for making these claims.  So today, it is a kudos to Technorati, Last.fm and del.icio.us – thank you for joining us in this important work on identity.

Yesterday, we started seeing incoming refers from the Beeb. This is very exciting.

This morning, we received a note from Rowan at BBC Collective saying we’d been featured in this week’s web column by David Thair. And sure enough, there we are:

There’s an even bigger identity issue here though, and that’s the problem of duplication, clashes and impersonation. Don’t you hate it when your username has been taken? And what if that person – never mind intentional impersonation – is just behaving shamefully? ClaimID are one of the companies trying to invent a unique online ID to prevent this from happening. You can register your real name and your internet handle with a profile listing the sites you own, each of which you can “verify” by updating with a bit of hidden ClaimID code.

Very interesting article on privacy implications in Knowledge@Wharton. In the article, privacy implications of sharing in social tools are examined. Interesting is the following:

Wharton management professor Stephen J. Kobrin says he is not sure that “Who owns you?” is the right question. “It seems there’s just so much information out there about all of us that it’s all in the public domain. It may not be there legally, but there’s so much in so many places and there are so many ways to aggregate it, that it may not be a reasonable question. The real question is: ‘Is it possible to provide some protection to individuals to prevent everything about them from going to everyone else? And, if it is possible, how can you do it?’”

As our identities are document represented in multiple places and contexts – traditional sources like credit reporting agencies, new sources like blogs and SNS – will we see the advent of legislation controlling how we can use this information? It is an intriguing question.

Consider the following scenario – one in which someone spreads gossip about you to a group of friends, and gossip about you online. In the first case, the gossip will likely impact your life, but it may not have long-lasting implications. In the second case, however, when the gossip is cached and stored in search engines, it has a long-lasting impact that may stay with you forever. It is quite different – and very troublesome.

Susan Freiwald, a former Wharton faculty member who now teaches cyberlaw at the University of San Francisco School of Law, says the legal community has been debating for years whether it is more appropriate to view personal information as a form of property that is “owned” and therefore subject to property protections, or to look at personal information as a privacy right. Over time, the privacy-rights model, not the property model, has emerged as the prism through which courts view rights to personal information.

“The ownership model hasn’t taken off in the law,” says Freiwald. “The basic idea in law is that someone who gathers the information owns it, whether it’s you [who gathers it] or not.” For instance, courts have generally rejected arguments by litigants who have challenged the ability of credit card companies to use personal information on the grounds that the litigants “owned” information about themselves.

In Freiwald’s view, however, privacy law remains largely uncharted waters in affording protection to individuals. “Our legal system does a much better job protecting property interests rather than dignity interests, such as privacy,” she says. “You can draw that conclusion by looking at the penalties we impose on people for stealing intellectual or tangible property versus for violating privacy. The law is not protecting personal privacy very well.” When courts do find privacy violations, she says, the penalties are low.

A very interesting article. You can check it out here.