I’m attending the Identity Mashup Conference in Cambridge, MA this week. Its a different kind of conference for me, for one thing I’m not speaking which oftentimes is the price of attendance, for another its not a solely technology-oriented conference. Many of the sessions focus on the social aspects of network identity, things like reputation, trust, privacy, civil liberties and community building. Its quite an eye-opener to look up from the bits and bytes for a while and learn something about the human aspects of network technologies.

Interestingly there are lots of Mac laptops in evidence here: in the session I’m sitting in now, about 30% of folks are sitting in front of Apple kit.