Scott Blomquist

Marshall Kirkpatrick’s claim that Vidoop is “a company made up largely of engineers with military backgrounds” makes for a great thriller plot, especially in the context of his National ID discussion over at ReadWriteWeb. That description, however, doesn’t reflect the Vidoop that I know. One of our developers was a civilian researcher at the Naval Research Labs for a couple of years, and one of our developers was in the Army long enough to spend some time in Afghanistan. That’s the extent of our military ties.

That said, there are some very interesting things to think about elsewhere in Marshall’s post. Like him, I’m not excited about being issued a National ID, let alone the prospect of having my OpenID inseparably tied to it. That just doesn’t make sense. I shouldn’t need a National ID to have a flickr account, and any such ID shouldn’t be associated with my search engine use.

But there are scenarios where being able to convey certain institutionally-verified claims about my identity online would be useful. For example, I miss certain wines from Washington State’s wine country because the State of Oklahoma won’t let me have wine shipped here. Perhaps it’s because they don’t want minors to have access to alcohol through the mail, or more likely it’s because they don’t want alcohol in the state for which they didn’t get their tax money. Either way, being able to prove that I’m old enough or that I paid appropriate taxes on the transaction are things that technology could enable in the near future, and there’s absolutely no reason that OpenID couldn’t be one of the protocols involved at the time I prove such things.

Remember that OpenID is all about putting control of your online identity in your very own hands, and there are built-in controls to make sure it will always continue to be that way. (The strongest such control is that anyone who doesn’t like the way the current Identity Providers work can always run their own Provider.)

Your identity shouldn’t do things that you don’t want it to do, but it should certainly be able to do all of the things that you do want it to do. And with OpenID each of us has the ability to want our OpenID to do different things.

I have vast amounts of respect for scientists and what they do. They have built an industry that pays them to do fun things like think up new things and argue about the futures of existing things.

Interestingly, though, their industry insulates them from some of the pressures that cause non-scientists to do imperfect things in the short term that might solve a problem well enough to create tremendous amounts of value for everyday people doing everyday things (even if the solution comes with its own new problems).

Today, I saw one of the most poignant examples of this phenomenon that I have ever seen (from Tim Bray’s XML People blog article):

So Tim Berners-Lee built a hypertext that worked across the Internet. Lots of computer scientists had been chiseling away at the problem for years, but Tim Berners-Lee ignored the entire body of theory and pasted together the simplest possible version with one-way pointers carrying no guarantees of what (if anything) they pointed at. No computer scientist could have conceived of anything so tenuous and fragile.

And thus was born the World Wide Web as we know it today.

I’m sure I should be embarrassed to admit this, but when it comes to 21st century staple TV genres, my hands-down favorite is what I like to call “The Evil Psychology Experiment” sub-genre of reality TV.

I was just thinking back through my list of favorites, and was going to claim that “The Joe Schmo Show” is the earliest example that I can think of. Unfortunately, I thought of a show that certainly came before it, and even more unfortunately, it’s “Fear Factor”. I don’t know much about Fear Factor, other than that it’s famous for the gross-out eating challenge. I’m not at all interested in that sort of thing or anything else about that show, so we’ll pretend that Fear Factor doesn’t exist, or at least that there’s such a thing as “highbrow evil psychology experiments”.

Another exceptional example is called “Solitary“. Maybe someday I’ll spend some time talking about it. For now, let’s just say that my favorite episode involves thousands of those bouncy balls that you can get out of grocery store vending machines.

But what inspired me to post this in the first place is a truly ridiculous show that started airing just last month on FOX called “The Moment of Truth“. I’ve heard a little about it, and decided to catch the first episode or two on hulu.com, so I’m sitting here right now watching it. It’s not the kind of show that I’m going to manage to stick with for more than a couple of episodes, but the premise is very interesting. Once a person is cast for the show, they’re asked around 50 compromising personal questions on a polygraph, and the producers choose 21 of them. From that point, all they have to do is answer a series of progressively more personal questions truthfully on national television with 3 of their closest friends and relatives in the front row.

Here’s episode 1 on hulu for you to enjoy for yourself: