selling webid protocol, the elevator pitch

Ive been selling webid protocol as a "viable" next wave on the basis that: you just add a paragraph to your current "home page". 
 
Then, concerning the digital certs folks have already (used for signing e-forms in real estate) : the digitalid you have for signing disclosures and forms... it can then point to your home page. Together, they fill out the usual stuff on website forms.
 
I get around the "useability" of #me by: well I dont'. its not an issue, and should not be one. if I were to get challenged to defend "the gibberish" as iot would probably be called, I'll say something like: Its just a pointer to a particular paragraph in the text. Just like the old days, when the web started!
 
That's it. That's the elevator pitch. I can deliver it in about 3 sentences, and about 10 seconds. Which is good, becuase that's about all I get - before eyes glaze over.
 
So, its quite important that we tell the same core story: folks amend their existing home page, and get their digital ids updated so it points there. 
 
some of the younger age group people (40+) do ask so what? and why bother? (Its usually the partner of the person Im addressing, making small talk.)
 
So you dont have to remember a different password at all those sites!
 
This usually gets a nod. Chink go the wine glasses. Hopefully they go and talk about the techno-wizz they just met.. from X.
 
In the US particularly, with mainstream media sites like foxnews.com doing **really** good SSO login and UI for the demographic I work with (who like the conservatism that Fox sells) they already get it that the login page comes from their choice of yahoo, hotmail, gmail ... login servers. Even "that facebook thing." Thus, I find the main message has already been sold (by the likes of Fox). Its in the general consciousness, in the US, already. 
 
I dont see much evidence in UK media that there is anything like as sophisticated an SSO uptake experience as you see in the online US media. I supsect it becuase the US just plays the game better, with CNN and Fox having equity shares in the likes of Facebook. There is a mutual interest in take off...
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
> Subject: Re: WebID-ISSUE-7 (bblfish): Move esw wiki contents? [WebID wiki]
> From: henry.story@bblfish.net
> Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:47:17 +0100
> CC: public-xg-webid@w3.org
> To: home_pw@msn.com
> 
> 
> On 29 Jan 2011, at 21:04, Peter Williams wrote:
> 
> > Not sure I like:
> 
> (( In the future for specific problems with the wiki, please start a new e-mail thread, so 
> we can track issues one by one, and not in one large thread that is going to be infinitely 
> long. That avoids discussions overlapping too. Also it is best to have one issue per
> thread as far as possible. Thanks. ))
> 
> I'll interpret your post here as far as it is relevant to this thread, ie our relation to the
> wiki.
> 
> > "A Web ID looks similar to a home page URL, but it specifically identifies Entity You of Type: Person. Typically, the definition of Type: Person,comes from a vocabulary or ontology or data dictionary. One such vocabulary is FOAF, which is the basis of this effort." on the webid page.
> 
> My opinion is that this is lax writing trying to speak to a particular audience. First of all 
> a WebID identifies an Agent, so it can identify people, dogs, extraterrestrials,
> robots, and companies too. 
> 
> Different audiences need different levels of introduction. This is a more of an lighthearted 
> introduction, that may fail for being a bit too technical. It certainly has not had a lot of 
> careful editing. 
> 
> There is a lot more one can do there to improve it.
> 
> > What I really liked about the use of RDFa in the FOAF+SSL pre-incubator world was that the good ol' home page could easily be foaf card, and thus the home page URI is a webid stem. To the average punter (who will rarely understand the significance of #tag on the end), the home page URI is a webid.
> 
> So your issue here is not with the wiki but with # URLs or with useability, right? 
> I'll open another thread to answer that.
> 
> > The is no way in a million years I'll get even 2 realtors to ever use the foaf-generator sites and tools listed on the wiki. Getting them to add a paragraph of special html markup interspersed with normal paragraph form...is quite feasible. Its a template, and we can give it to them.
> 
> If I take this as a criticism of the wiki, and so on track of this thread, then I'd have
> to see this as a reference and criticism of http://esw.w3.org/Foaf%2Bssl/HOWTO
> 
> The RDFa examples on the HOWTO page are out of date and need updating. So does the text need
> improving? Certainly. The spec is already much better at that. For those things it may be 
> better in fact to remove the text from the wiki, and really concentrate more on improving 
> the spec. 
> 
> So my conclusion:
> 
> Where possible if we can do something in the spec, we should concentrate on that,
> so that we can focus on quality. The wiki was a way to get to the spec. Once we 
> have the spec, it may be a way to help people with other levels of issues. 
> 
> 
> Henry
> 
> Social Web Architect
> http://bblfish.net/
>