Perspectives.on10.net: podcast interview with Jon Udell on identity & "Understanding Windows CardSpace"

Jon Udell recently launched a new interesting format on the website perspectives.on10.net.

Perspectives is a series of in-depth conversations with passionate innovators. Most work for Microsoft; some work elsewhere; all are advancing the state of the art in areas as diverse as robotics, digital identity, e-science, and social software.

Information technology is the common thread, and Perspectives appeals to the technically-minded, but the show also aims to tell stories in ways that make sense to a wider audience.

Each installment of Perspectives is delivered as an audio podcast, and supplemented by a partial text transcript.

The first episode was an interview with two guys from the Robotics Studio team, Tandy Trower and Henrik Frystyk Nielsen. The quality of the interview is clearly top notch, the scope of the topics strategic & forward looking but still solidly rooted in technology: Jon’s editing makes things flow beautifully, and the transcript is incredibly handy for speed readers & search engines. In short, I LOVE IT 🙂

Hence, it is with ill-concealed pride that I announce the subject of the second episode: it is a chat I had with Jon back in December, just days before the book came out. The casus belli was the book itself, that Jon was so kind to read in prerelease version, but we ended up talking about identity on a much wider sense. We touched on certificates versus managed cards, omnidirectional vs unidirectional identities, WS-*, openID… Jon is a *great interviewer*, and managed to keep things going without ever getting stuck too long on technical details (which is instead a tendency of my verbal incontinence: see the latest installment of the Tao series here, here and here). We also briefly touched on the book, with Jon saying very nice things such as “What I particularly liked about this book is the lengthy introduction that sets the context, not just for CardSpace but for previous iterations — what problems did they solve, what problems did they not solve, and why does that lead us to the architecture we have now” and “Your title is Understanding CardSpace, and the book lives up to its title. After I read it, I did have a better understanding of CardSpace. So, nicely done“.

Thank you Jon for the space you gave me, I am really honored to be featured there 🙂