Speaking about signal to noise ration at last week's Internet Identity Workshop (as discussed in the last newsletter), the informality of the event can sometimes be very detrimental to the educational opportunities.

Sun Microsystem's Eve Maler was presenting an introduction and overview to the ProtectServe system (which my readers got to hear about a couple of months ago) and was periodically drowned out by the background conversations taking place in the "common area" 30 to 50 feet from Eve's presentation location. Still, the presentation was well received by the audience, who increasingly drew their chairs closer to better hear how this relationship manager model could be useful to the stand-alone user as well as to the enterprise as a whole.

Those fortunate enough to have come early to my keynote speech at the recent European Identity Conference got to see a different (but similar) presentation about ProtectServe, which is available online.

ProtectServe is about the possible dialog among four parties: a user/user agent, an authorization manager, a service provider and a consumer. An interesting question was raised to Maler during the IIW session when Oracle's Nishant Kaushik asked if ProtectServe understood CARML ( the Client Attribute Requirement Markup Language) -- a Liberty Alliance standard for a formal language for just such a dialog. It's a doubly interesting question because Maler has been very active in the Liberty Alliance but triply interesting in light of Oracle's recent purchase offer for Sun. Maler did promise to "seriously consider adding CARML". We might even say it's quadruply interesting since one of Maler's personas is "XMLGRRL," highlighting her role as one of the inventors of XML. ProtectServe is interesting, at least I think so. Watch the YouTube video and judge for yourself.

Interesting juxtapositions like Sun's Maler and Oracle's Kaushik happen in almost any session at IIW. Google sitting down with Yahoo, Microsoft with RedHat, corporate marketers with born-again hippies -- it just goes on and on. It's eye-opening for sure, frequently educational and always entertaining. I will be back next time.

Notes from last week's IIW sessions should soon be available on the Web site  and photos, blog notes and so on should be able to be retrieved with the tag #iiw8 (try it on Flickr, for example). Check out those pictures if your idea of an identity conference includes words like "stuffy" or "boring."

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.