Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Nebulous Pontification


I suspect Ping's Patrick Harding is referring to me (or my ilk) when he says in the inaugural post of his new blog (with a wonderfully creative play on words in the title 'The Patrick Harding Blog')
My goal is to make sure there is a practical aspect to this blog rather than a bunch of nebulous theorizing. In the event that I am forced down the path of pontification I will promise to at least warn people up front.

I actually considered calling this blog 'Nebulous Pontification' but preliminary search tests returned too many French bridge links.

Patrick is Australian, but quite smart nonetheless (I feel comfortable saying this as I myself am part Australian - having lived there as a teenager, drank beer there as a recent university grad, and been jet-lagged there as a business traveller).

Consequently, I will be reading Patrick's posts going forward.

He is off to a fine start I think

Post # 2 - he discusses the relevance of user-centric identity within the enterprise and comes to the conclusion - 'not much', citing the seeming incompatibility between the a user desiring control over their identity and an enterprise with the same desires. Umm, junior file clerk or the CIO, who wins?

Post #3 - he presents a proposal from Ping for so-called 'Dynamic Federation', essentially tweaking SAML 2.0 for faster & easier federation between partners (taking a page from OpenID's book by having the user facilitate IdP discovery).

Bonza stuff.

I will however predict that, before long, Patrick will discover that it is not easy to maintain such a high level of insight & expertise (as evidenced here) and will then descend to the sort of nebulizing theory he is so scornful of as a rookie blogger. At that time, expect embedded YouTube videos of historic Australian beer commercials or equally inane content.

I'll take this opportunity to submit an alternative blog title (admittedly without the pizazz of the current choice)

  • Between a Rock and a Harding Place

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