http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2029720,00.asp

found/discussed here: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/17/002251

Not a bad overview article on the phenomenon. (Although the /. discussion seems to suggest that the people that annotated the screenshots didn’t really know that much about IRC; apparently the “lots of cryptic data” is fairly standard stuff.)

As the (provocative) title suggests, the outlook of those interviewed is not exactly rosy. But there may be other ways of dealing with the problem than the "whack-a-mole" method of trying to root them out individually.

via BoingBoing: talk on Identity 2.0

A talk given at the O'Reilly Open Source conference. It's an impressive (and very slick) presentation. So slick, in fact, that it's hard for me to tell whether the author has (whether intentionally or not) swept something the size of New Jersey under the rug. But it's worth watching, especially for people who are looking for ways to intelligently jazz up their talks. (The style is apparently copied from that of Lawrence Lessig: credit where due.)

One minor note on the presentation: he explicitly conflates identity with reputation. I think that this makes identity more complicated than necessary. (I also think that reputation systems should allow rep to be established in more distributed fashion, as it generally is in human interaction...but that's a different discussion.)

Those who want to look more into this (which might include me, later) may want to check out the Identity 2.0 blog.