Our recent proposal (a schema for handling the reputation of people posting comments to blogs) was based on the assumption that reputation management should be tightly coupled with identity management.

Maybe I gave too much credit to Dick Hardt and his vision where

After some discussions and readings, I changed my mind: a reputation, any type of reputation, is just the outcome of one of the many applications that can be built from identity. Where your identity is

(both the images above are from Dick’s famous presentation)

This could seam a vague and blurred differentiation, but I’m reassured by Phil Windley’s words:

A lot of people claim that anything related to them is “identity data” and that’s part of the problem. Records of your transactions with a lender is not identity data; it’s transaction data. Your credit score isn’t identity data; it’s reputation.

The Identity 2.0 environment will be shaped much like the following sketch. It depicts the separation of the identity providers and identity based service providers and it’s quite likely that:

• some identity provider will also offer additional identity based services;
• self-hosted identities will stick to basic identity management capabilities;
• reputation will definitely be a nice application field.