Unlike some people, I’m not much of an identity guy, so I wasn’t very interested in Kim Cameron‘s presentation on Windows’ identity solution. But my curiosity was piqued as the talk ran on.

Dion and I found it interesting just how many of the presenters, like Kim, were running on Macs.

Some of Kim’s points:

• CardSpace is Microsoft’s implementation of an open Information Card standard that multiple vendors are implementing on different platforms.
• “We created a visual metaphor for files, but not for people.” The Information Card standard has a nice UI for choosing between multiple identities that you may have for yourself.
• Identities are either self-signed or signed by a trusted third-party.
• He demoed IE’s smooth integration with CardSpace — so a WordPress blog for example could allow users to auth with an Information Card provider instead of a username and password. You can also decide how much information you want to expose in the transaction.

I’m so happy to see that the identity folks have been up to really useful things over the past few years. I hope something like this makes it into the wild. It was unfortunate that Kim’s demo was a mock-up.