The “Semantic Web” is supposed to give meaning to information by identifying relationships between websites, media, news, events, outcomes, etc, and as such, deliver information that is more meaningful or relevant to us. What I find interesting about the Semantic Web or Web 3.0 is the concept of ‘me’ on the web, which is why I wanted to write about Identity 2.0.

It will soon be easier for an unrelated person to find your life history online. Between public records, social networks, professional experiences, and general website use: we leave fingerprints all over the internet. I am likely registered for 100 different websites and perhaps 5 of those accounts are ‘interoperable’ allowing me to log in using a single identity. But Identity 2.0 is about more than logging in with a single account, Identity 2.0 involves how the web gives meaning to our identity.

• Reviews: If we reviewed books, movies, colleges, jobs, restaurants, articles, consultants or investment opportunities with a single unique ID, the ‘weight’ attached to each review, its impact on the object, and its impact on ourselves would all be more contextual and meaningful. Imagine reading book reviews weighted by the set of person who like the same books as you. In the same light, “expert reviews” would be able to more quickly identify merit or fraud over large data sets of objects.
• News: I admittedly don’t read any news sites except TechCrunch, Facebook News Feed, and France24.com in french. Sometimes I leave BBC running on my TV, but not since I lived in India. If the internet ‘knew who I was’ it would both route me more meaningful news, and it would route my own user-generated news to relevant end users. In order to route me news, the internet needs to know more about me: perhaps my job, interests, travel plans, education, entertainment, or pressing concerns. The only news I receive based on who I am and what I am doing comes from other people within facebook or linkedin.
• Career: It is ridiculous that one employer should have a monopoly over the specialized skills of an expert employee. Identity 2.0 enables managers to hire specialists for short-term high-paid work based on who they are and what they know, without having to build in-house teams or core competencies. Likewise, 50% of the workforce would need to structurally change their jobs, because 50% of work performed is nothing else but the training, selection, filtering, and distribution of non-digital human information. The more human information is digital, the easier it is to find and reward, and the less redundant information will be between organizations.
• Government: The ability to connect people with shared problems or concerns is still an act of phone calls or facebook groups. The ability to connect people with shared concerns and translate those concerns into actions that affect the greatest number of people through legislation, collective action, policy reform, publicity pressures, or direct litigation is in its infancy because we only tie problems to our online identities when we are directly solicited. If we tied our critical issues to our identities in a way that the internet could meaningfully connect us: publicity would more quickly translate into reform.
• Health: Our health care system is a system of crisis response. Our health identity is consigned to our medical records in the filing cabinet of a hospital, and all subtleties of our lives that might clue in a physical or mental problem are lost to the digital world. Identity 2.0 will enable the digitalization, tracking, and analysis of passive health data from travel plans to family dynamics to financial situations. But more than just tracking us, health care should be talking to us. There will be red flags if a new diet disrupts my sleep schedule or new medications are causing excessive weight loss. Our concept of health insurance will change as we update our online identity, and it updates us.
• Social: The implications of identity 2.0 on the social sphere is a real blue ocean of possibility. Within 10 years, social networks allow us to ’stay in touch’ with thousands of weak relationships, as opposed to the few dozen strong relationships we meet in person. The more identity we have online, the quicker we can establish trust, plan events, exchange media, and transfer our identity to mobile phones or GPS locations. If you move to a new city, within a month of joining a building, finding a job, joining a gym- you can connect to new like-minded groups in a low-risk environment. Online identity also implies online activity, where our reviews, comments, tweets, articles, and portfolios represent more of our social lives.

When we search Google, we are searching the same Google as a neighbor with a completely different identity. Personalized advertising aside, the internet itself is not personal. Ideally, searching the internet would weigh search results by your identity, social network, and professional network. If I’m a University of Chicago student and I search for apartments, results should be weighed by my location, by peer reviews of other students, perhaps even by independent review firms specializing in matching college students to apartments. If I search for “Brian Mayer” the search results should be weighted by network and context relevancy. But all of this depends not only on me searching the internet but on the internet searching me.