I was in Venice last week. I’m afraid to say that it looks a bit different.

In the middle of the picture above you can just make out the Bridge of Sighs – it’s the thing in the middle that isn’t an advert for a bank.

Below is the Museo Correr end of St Mark’s Square.

After picking myself up, I went to the Migropolis exhibition which made me think a little differently about these apparent acts of cultural vandalism.

One of the themes of the exhibition was Venice’s identity as a truly global city and marketplace. For 1000 years it has been a trade centre and the meeting place between East and West. While in medieval times, this might have meant Arab merchants with galleys full of spices, today it is about glassware and masks made in China, Somalians with fake Gucci bags and — yes — real Gucci bags. Venice has always been a shop front, a meeting place between rich western customers and eastern traders. There’s something strangely apt about the advertising hoardings on the sides of the city’s famous landmarks.

Looked at from a slightly different perspective, it’s potentially the city’s quintessential expression.

I also learned about this:

It’s the Venetian: a resort hotel in Macau, filled with facsimiles of the original’s famous landmarks and canals – it’s apparently the largest building in Asia. I don’t know if you can see it from space, but wouldn’t be surprised. The Migropolis exhibition noted that the original city risks being replaced by this and the Las Vegas version — they get the shopping done more conveniently and efficiently for all parties.

PS. If you’re interested, I’d recommend a dip into Against Venice, a splendid rant against the city as a kind of Euro-Disney for snobs. I love Venice, personally, but it never harms to read a different perspective.

I spent the day today at the Wealth of Networks II conference, the agenda of which was set out as the next-generation of the Internet.

It was a good event and the organisers managed to bring together some top-rate speakers in a great venue with rock-solid internet, for once. And it was free – yay for the ESPRC which created the funding.

The slight oddness was that all three of the three panel events at the conference, and one keynote, despite their ostensible themes, turned out to be about trust and identity online. I rather suspect that might have been in reaction to the top-down research model described in the first keynote which admitted that E70mn of EU research funding into the next ‘net was being spent without investigating users’ concerns or agendas.

We’re becoming increasingly aware that there’s an issue with the identity and trust thing. What are the headlines? Backlash against StreetView; Facebook’s T’s & C’s; stalking, bullying, frauds and impositions.

There are two poles in this debate that need to recognised and reconciled in whatever the Next Web brings.

Authentication is a good thing. Being able to prove that it’s you buying that DVD and accessing the details of your bank account; you (if you’re a 12-year-old-girl) joining that social network designed for 12-year-old girls; you registering your general election vote, should that come to pass. Tracking down cyberbullies, slanderers and child-porn disseminators also sounds good.

On the other hand, anonymity is also extremely valuable. If you’re in a repressive regime and blogging about that, then it ought to be possible. It should be possible here in the UK, if you stay lawful (I’m already inviting some big questions, to which we have no answer).

You might want to have separate professional and personal online personae – if you join a dating site, for example, you probably don’t want your colleagues finding that profile. Avoiding stalkers without retiring from online would be a good thing. Teens frequently maintain multiple personae to explore different social scenarios and make mistakes without (real) consequences, I understand, and that certainly sounds like a very good thing compared to the horror of my own teenage years.

So we need a way for people to prove their identity if they need to; to protect their identity if they need to. And about a million shades of privacy and open-ness in between.

The internet safety / government services agenda would sway towards everyone having a registered identity with some third-party, let’s say the BBC, who would act as a trust broker.

But how much are you going to trust anyone to be that broker? A panel late in the day highlighted several elements of grey in the word ‘trust’. For example, sometimes, a better word would be ‘confidence’:

• I trust that my bank won’t run off with my salary next month.
• I do not trust my bank to offer me the best financial advice for my individual situation.

So do I trust my bank or not? You see? The first example is better described as confidence. You know that NatWest would probably not be better-off running away to southern Spain with your month’s wages. It’s an informed gamble. But you don’t think they could be trusted with your finances full stop – you don’t think they’re all beautiful people who only care about your interests.

Trust (real trust) depends enormously on context and implies a belief in the moral character of a person/organisation/business. Most likely, a lot of the services we might be described as trusting (Banks, Amazon, eBay) would be better described as things we have confidence in.

Added to that, sometimes we have no choice but to sort-of trust. Helen Keegan pointed out that oftentimes we click through acceptance of a service’s terms and conditions, because there’s no real alternative. We either want to do banking online or we don’t – we can’t disagree with point 5 in the t’s & c’s and have them changed. It’s like it or lump it.

I don’t really trust anyone to be the trust-broker of my online identities – or yours, dear reader. Let’s look at the possibilities, currently:

• The Government. Obvious non-starter. I might be a dissident of some sort. (and *what!* 25% of government databases are already illegal)
• Government Organisation: e.g. BBC. Similarly flawed.
• Private Corporate: e.g. Google. Already massively failed in China.
• Private small company: might turn evil; vulnerable to hackers, potentially, eh monster.com. And who the hell are you, anyway?
• The UN: this is a possibility, but once the UN is hacked, then how do I recover my ID?

So this probably leaves the least neat, least integrated, least semantic possibility:

Lots of stuff. Regular password for stuff you don’t care about; unique passwords for stuff you do; OpenID and Facebook Connect and MyBlogLog and Google for social apps; NI number and PIN for government apps; Account Number and PIN for commercial stuff.

Messy. And I think it may be the case that ‘messy’ is the best solution to online identity, trust and anonymity for a long time to come. I can’t really imagine that computer scientists are going to be the people that manage to overcome that.

That is probably not what the ESPRC, or Southampton & Imperial Universities wanted me to walk away thinking today. But thanks again for the thinking.

…certain kinds of databases are going to become really big and really useful. We are just in the early stages, digital identity doesn’t really work yet. But that will, you know, start to coalesce, where all these different sources of identity will start to be resolved and connect to each other. And we’ll have a rich identity system you could call Who 2.0.

I definitely agree. Think about the amount of information that Yahoo! has about you. It’s got most of my email, my address book, my pictures and my bookmarks. Google has got my search history, some more of my email and pictures, my RSS feeds, my calendar and another address book. Both know about this blog, and know it’s connected to all that other stuff.

O’Reilly is bullish that this will be empowering: “What web 2.0 teaches is that we’re using people to make computers smarter.” A web that knows what you like, what you probably want to do next, and the information that is relevant to you. Larry Page once said: “The ultimate search engine… would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.” It’s going to need to know a lot about you in order to do that. A move towards single-sign on, whereby your web identity across Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, e-Bay and the rest remains the same, will help to facilitate this ‘rich identity’.

It’s also quite worrying to a lot of people, though. If your Firefox password manager — the single sign-on we have today — turned out to be flawed (gulp) then that’s quite a big portion of your life on show, and abusable. Think about the explosion of identity ‘services’: Garlik, Reputation Defender, OpenID, ClaimID, SAML and OSIS, to name but a few. Identity Theft is already rife — 4% of us suffered it this year alone. Probably a lot of people aren’t yet aware of how much information about them is openly available on the web. As internet use matures, they’ll become more aware, and there will be greater outcry against incursions into our privacy.

The trouble is that we’re moving forward without having cracked the basic problems around security. Password-based systems suffer from user laziness, get hacked or the information given away for free. Smartcards and the like get stolen, forgotten or lost. Public/Private key programs are too complex for most users. Biometric systems are expensive, not universally available and are also said to be ‘too secure’ — once someone figures out how to fake your fingerprints, for example, how will you ever get your identity back? Combinations of these techniques are more secure, sure, but since their ingredients are vulnerable, they’re ultimately vulnerable too. I’m no expert on this matter, but I’m well-aware that there’s considerable unease about the inability of machines to tell if it’s really you.

And that’s why Who 2.0 is going to be such a hot potato. On the one hand we’ve got people like O’Reilly, the top brains at Google and the like trying to make the web do more. To make it work more intelligently according to what sort of person you are, what your interests are and the context. On the other, web users are thinking ‘hang on, how did you know I wanted that? I’m not comfortable with this.’

More importantly to Vox, we believe there is very little out there that is adequate serving the older, non “hooking-up” market. MySpace is great, but it’s not the best place to share pictures of your children with the friends and family you are closest to.

Vox will focus on finely-tuned privacy controls, allowing users to present a different face to different groups of people. Apparently, the rather crippling limitation of having to be a Vox user to leave comments will be removed too: “this will also be a user settable thing”.

I like all this. One issue with social networks is the extent to which your profile becomes your identity on the web. And the identity you present to friends or family might be very different to the one you want to present to your boss.

(The question comes from Simon Collister, who I am sure has a few ideas of his own up his sleeve. But since he wrote a fab post about tagging, which in turn fuelled my own effort on the subject, it’s definitely my turn to go first!)

Non-linear search is one of the bounties of the web 2.0 approach that has been relatively unheralded because of the noise surrounding the ongoing “digg/wikipedia/myspace/youtube is heaven/hell” wrangles.

The expression comes from a post on the BusinessWeek blog. Interviewing Joshua Schachter from del.icio.us, Heather Green notes:

Joshua made an interesting distinction. Instead of finding information a la Google, social search is about finding knowledge. The idea is how do you connect with the information you need in a context that’s knitted together by people and by human expertise, rather than the linear way we do it now, which is to type a search term into a box.

So what do we understand by linear and non-linear search in this context?

Linear search: You already know the answer in many senses. Or you know exactly what you’re looking for and there is a finite answer. What is the capital of Uzbekistan? (“capital city Uzbekistan”). Even quite tricky facts are accessible. Room rates at the Hilton Hotel in Paris? (hilton paris “Rates” -“Paris Hilton”)

A lot of other searches work less well, though. “Good hotel London” brings up a load of sites that want to sell me rooms. What I really wanted, though, was a recommendation of a good hotel in London that meets my criteria — pretty central, cheap, not horrible. How am I going to find that on Google? How do I find “romantic restaurant cheap rome”, “what are the best blogs about supermarket wine” and “inexpensive ways to make your wife feel special”?

So how can I do better?

Non-linear search: The same search terms about the cheap, central-London hotel on del.icio.us produced this:

A site with customer reviews, a Google site that might help me judge their worth, and a specific recommendation. So which was more useful? (rhetorical)

Back to the idea of knowledge. A lot of the questions we really want to ask are the questions that we’d ask another human being, if we knew a person with the right qualifications for the job. Finding the name ‘Tashkent’ is one thing, but what is it like there? Where should I stay? What things should I see? Is there anything or anywhere I should avoid?

I’ve got no idea how to find the answers to those questions using Google. Simply entering the country’s name into del.icio.us provides me with a lot of better ideas:

These sites provide me with some contacts. Some real people. If I were going there, I’d ask the authors of ProgressoR and Registan, or find a message board there. And I’d probably ask Craig Murray (the UK’s ambassador to the country, as it happens), since he’s a fellow brit. I somehow think they might be more use for my questions than the CIA or Jimmy Wales, the top links on a Google search.

The Yahoo Answers site provides another solution to this quandary, though obviously, you’d need to rely on a resident of Uzbekistan (or wherever, or whatever) being a willing and able answerer. I haven’t tried it, but I’m not sure I fancy my chances on Uzbekistan nightlife. Depends what you want to know — they would probably do better on London hotels.

So how do tags help? Tags are a way of finding people who speak the same language as you. “Good cheap hotel London” means something real to those people — the people who use my language know what I mean to a far greater extent than Google ever could. When I search on tags rather than keywords, there is a better chance of finding them.

It all depends what you want from the Internet. A really big library/encyclopedia — the way they used to describe the web in the 90s? Fine — I think we’re probably already there. But I also think we can possibly expect a bit more. Immediate contact, perhaps, with specialists in whatever field you’re researching. Access to knowledge as well as facts.

People, networks, tags, wisdom — these things, for me, are 2.0. Forget the buzz startups and believe the promise.

Signs are that this will be an interesting read. Major corporate + apparent humility = addictive qualities. Check out this quotation from the first line of Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s latest blog entry from Sunday: “I had lunch with Tony Blair today. (And yes, I have been waiting all afternoon to type that.)”

How cool is that? He’s a big shot, but he’s just like you and me. He remains respectful throughout the entry to both the reader and to Blair. It’s good for me as a reader and him as the main conduit for communications between me and Sun. That’s because his opening remarks mean I might actually want to read what he’s got to say on the subject. He’s established himself as a human being with the same frailties as you and me, before he does anything else.