An interesting feature of the Commerce plan is the use of cellphones as security tokens. Businesses are already doing this. Bank of America, for example, issues a text message containing a security code to a customer’s cellphone as a prerequisite to larger online transactions. The customer has to input the security code to complete the transaction.

Despite what Libertarians and privacy mavens may think, there is a need for online identity verification and government may have a role to play in that process. The government already issues Social Security numbers, drivers licenses and passports, so it’s not unreasonable to look to a government agency to help administer a digital ID. In November, the German government rolled out a new national identity card with an RFID chip in it. The European Union is still wrestling with the concept of an EU identity card.

Like the other cards issued by the federal and state governments in the US, the digital ID would have to be voluntary. One would hope that a national digital identity program would also adhere to the Laws of Identity set out by Microsoft’s Kim Cameron in 2009.

Another promising feature of the plan set out by Commerce Secretary Locke was the establishment of NPEs — Non-Person Entities, such as corporations and service providers. Imagine how much spam would be eliminated if you set your mail system to only accept messages from validated NPEs and individuals.

There is still a lot of work to be done on this plan. There have already been some security flaws found in the German ID card. However, the institution of a safe and reliable identification method will ensure the viability of the net as a place for commerce and communication.

James Cowie, writing on the renesys blog, does a good job of explaining the global game of whack-a-mole going on now with Wikileaks. As Cowie writes, “To prevent a repeat performance of the EveryDNS experience, the Swiss site [.ch is the Swiss country domain -- ed.] seems to have been selected for heavy reinforcement through DNS diversification. If you ask for the authoritative servers for wikileaks.ch today, you’ll find no fewer than 14 different authoritative nameservers, spread across eleven different autonomous systems, in eight different countries, from Switzerland to Canada to Malaysia.”

In short, the internet is doing what it was designed to do: transmit information even if one or two, or two hundred nodes on the net are disabled. As Cowie notes in his conclusion:

You can’t burn down the Library of Alexandria any more — it will respawn in someone’s basement in Stockholm, or Denver, or Beijing.

Meanwhile, New York Magazine’s Intelligencer column has a pretty smart take on Assange’s emerging social media strategy (hint: check out #cablegate on Twitter).

1. TIME: Do Not Be Always On
2. PLACE: Live in Person
3. CHOICE: You May Always Choose None of the Above
4. COMPLEXITY: You Are Never Completely Right
5. SCALE: One Size Does Not Fit All
6. IDENTITY: Be Yourself
7. SOCIAL: Do Not Sell Your Friends
8. FACT: Tell the Truth
9. OPENNESS: Share, Don’t Steal
10. PURPOSE: Program or Be Programmed

A more in-depth discussion of the book is on NPR’s On Point.  The repository of this popular NYU prof’s writings can be found on his website, Rushkoff.com.

In a similar vein,  author Nicholas Carr examines the effect of extensive internet use on our cognitive processes. His most-recent book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, is excerpted in the June issue of Wired. The upshot: the net promotes skimming and multi-tasking at the expense of concentrated linear thinking.

Malcolm Gladwell tackled the limited utility of social networks in his recent New Yorker article, “Small Change, Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.” Gladwell uses examples from the American Civil Rights movement to show why “strong ties” are a necessary component of real social change. He contrasts this with the “weak ties” engendered by social media:

The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

Gladwell has identified the particular weakness of click-here activism and a trend in networked communication.  As Gladwell writes in his conclusion: “The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo.”

It doesn’t take a pundit to posit a shift in the zeitgeist regarding the web. Now that the network is ubiquitous, now that the internet accounts for such a large portion of our daily diet of information, we really do have to watch what we eat.  Critical thinking and personal agency is part of the equation. An awareness of how the medium can skew the message  (and maybe our synapses) also helps. The limits of internet activism also must be acknowledged, along with an understanding of the web’s place in the broader economic context. But more on that later.

Right now I have to do some yard work.

According to a Symantec study published last year, 90 percent of all email is now spam. And a 2009 Canadian study found that the cost of computer security intrusions nearly doubled from 2008 to 2009.

Anonymity is an anathema to the transactional web. In order for the internet to continue to be a viable communication medium and platform for business transactions, there must be a simple and sound method to verify identity across the web. This is not a new idea, but it’s been in the news a lot recently with Facebook’s recent retreat from using user data to create the social graph.

At issue are two aspects of identity: commercial identity and personal identity.  Commercial identity is a requirement of any transaction — proof that you are who you say you are. This verification of commercial identity is the core service that credit card companies have provided for the last 50 years. Personal identity is about who we think we are. Personal identity is a construct of self that is created from our network of friends and acquaintances,  our likes and dislikes and the way we spend our time.

In the last few years, the concept of personal identity has expanded into social media. As people share more of themselves online, and as the network becomes better at logging every mouse click, text message, purchase and comment generated by an individual, a broader construct of personal identity has emerged. That is the perceived value of social networks like Facebook: they own vast piles of behavioral information about each individual subscriber. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of an “open graph” at the F8 developers’ conference in San Francisco last month was a logical step forward to link Facebook data with members’ activity on the wider web.

What Mr. Zuckerberg didn’t count on was that users might want to control the construction of their own identities and that the web community as a whole might prefer that the central repository of personal identification data were non-proprietary. Zuckerberg clearly did not read Kim Cameron’s Seven Laws of Identity, or take into account Microsoft’s failed Hailstorm experiment.

Yet the need for verifiable identity persists.  Symantec’s recent acquisition of Verisign’s authentication business looks to do for business what Zuckerberg proposed to do for consumers. Google has also resurrected the old Unix finger command for Gmail users (see Webfinger).

A host of other groups are working on the same problem. The just concluded tenth annual Internet Identity Workshop brought together some of the usual suspects in Mountain View, California, without arriving at a solution.

Whatever system of identity verification is ultimately adopted for the web, it must — as Cameron’s 7 Laws  decree — put users firmly in control and operate as a metasystem, drawing from many different identity repositories and contexts.

It wouldn’t be the first time a world-uniting social network was reduced to a footnote in the annals of internet history (remember Friendster or Dodgeball?). Creating something as ephemeral and fragile as a community can be a tricky thing. Putting a value on that social grouping is even more difficult.

Depending on who you talked to, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s refusal of a $1 billion buyout offer from Yahoo in 2006 was either a stroke of genius, or an act of incredible hubris by a kid who didn’t know any better. A June 2009 article in Wired, The Great Wall of Facebook, made much of the potential revenues of the network with 200 million registered users, but also noted that Facebook burned through an estimated $75 million in 2008, not including the capital it took in from investors like Microsoft and Digital Sky Technologies. The actual worth of the privately held company has left many analysts guessing, as noted in Facebook is Worth … What, Exactly?

In the real world, community is usually defined as a group of people living in the same place or sharing common interests. Online, common interests typically supplant location.  Other characteristics of a sustainable online community are:

• It fulfills a need for information or support; it must sustain interest
• It fosters interaction and dialog
• It allows users to control their own self-representation, or identity, through profiles or other means
• It has some moderation or self-regulation
• Some would also add that a successful community must have a purpose; it must reward the time put into it.

Arguably, Facebook has all of the elements of a successful online community. In its first draft, Facebook was tied to the real-world community of the Harvard campus, a group with shared interests and extensive offline interactions. As it expanded off campus, Facebook added great functionality, making it really easy for anybody to set up a personal web page and share photos and stories with their friends. Giving users the ability to accept or deny friend requests also promoted a sense of control and self-management over one’s social sphere (even while forcing some awkward choices).

So what has gone wrong at Facebook? Maybe it’s a victim of its own popularity. Clay Shirky in Communities, Audience and Scale (2002) makes the point that when communities grow beyond a small group in which most members know each other, they become audiences. This would account for some of the creep-factor felt by Facebookers today: the most active members seem to be performing their lives instead of actually living them.

Or maybe Facebook no longer provides much useful information. Maybe your extended circle of friends isn’t interested in what you had for breakfast, the fact that you’re hungover, or that the Quentin Tarantino character you most resemble is Jules Winnfield from Pulp Fiction.

Perhaps Facebook fails on the point of purpose: it just doesn’t reward the time you put into it. Or it could be just the fickle nature of online attention: Facebook has lost its cachet and the digerati have moved on.