The Semi-public Internet

Gated Communities, mp3 blogs and the Future of the Social Internet is an interesting essay speculating on how the copyright clampdown could just send mp3 blogs semi-underground, where some network of trust is built up before access is granted.

I think we’ll see this more and more as the Internet evolves; the continued increase in abuse of the public sections of the internet (comment and trackback spam being an example particularly close to my heart…) will force most of our participation at (rather than just consumption of) other peoples’ sites to require some level of authentication.

The challenge in all this will be how to manage this digital identity. I don’t want to have to go through some sign-up procedure for every blog I want to leave a comment on, and I’m not sure I’d trust any commercial organization to be in charge of my identity. There is work going on to come up with standards or protocols to govern distributed authentication and identity, but I’ve lost the link to them.

The upside is that once this stuff is worked out, it will allow us finer control over our privacy - allowing us to share more at the same time as sharing less: for example, I’d be able to open up my music collection easily to all of my friends and could similarly restrict access to my photos to just friends, or friends-of-friends.

(via Troubled Diva)