Unloading His Books, but Not His Conscience. What does it take to resell a stack of your old books on Amazon.com? And who benefits when you do? By Fred Bernstein. [New York Times: Technology]

Hailstorm is dead.  And reaction.  And more Reaction.Well, it's not dead; it just sounds like MS isn't the repository anymore, they'll package & sell the technology instead.

It seems to me that the idea of identity on the internet is really a lot more important than I thought for many years.  There was a recent story about a new eBay scam where sellers with great reputations were having their accounts hijacked and used to set up fraudulent sales.  I know I recently bought a DSL modem off eBay and getting ripped off was my #1 concern - there were certain auctions I didn't bid on because something just put me off to the seller.

I used to regard the idea of Internet identity as silly.  But the eBay story is very critical to people who use eBay heavily - no joke, some people earn a living off of eBay.  And the fact is, Jon Udell is right.  There are lots of people who I trust to varying degrees who I have never met.  And the Internet hasn't created that situation, it's just enlarged the sphere of people that I trust.  It used to be that people would trust Walter Cronkite, the president, their clergy, authors of books they read and liked.  What's changed is that anyone with good ideas or something to say to me can enter that sphere of trust if I can discover them.   This is where web services come in, and for web services to really succeed, and especially for web services to be monetized, we have to be able to trust people. Which means we have to know their identity.