First came the blogosphere, then the podosphere, and now, the eventsphere is coming! Brian Dear is building it at EVDB, the Events and Venues Database. The founder and CEO of EVDB, Brian sat down during Always On 2005: The Innovation Summit at Stanford, to speak with Scott Mace. Learn how to publish events on the EVDB service, how to subscribe to EVDB searches, and more about "simple event sharing." [Opening Move audio from IT Conversations]

Finally, the war on spam is shifting to controlling outbound email traffic. This has profound implications for Internet service providers and for their customers. Zombie spambot attacks are being met with responses including blacklisting of users and entire ISPs. At Inbox-IT 2005 in San Jose, Scott Mace spoke with Scott Chasin, CTO of MX Logic, Inc. about efforts from Silicon Valley and Washington D.C. to control the spambots. [Opening Move audio from IT Conversations]

J2EE, .Net, who needs em? Apparently not Amazon, Google, Yahoo or Sabre. Peter Yared, who headed up the Liberty Alliance project at Sun, took notice, left Sun and founded ActiveGrid, a company dedicated to building Web applications upon LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl), XML, Javascript and DHTML. As for grids, Yared maintains there are really three types: computational, utility (on-demand) and transaction grids (an example of which is ActiveGrid). He explains what makes a transaction grid different than using conventional load balancing software. How does ActiveGrid stack up against Microsoft's forthcoming Indigo? Why did ActiveGrid choose the Apache open source license for its base technology?

The Eclipse Foundation's EclipseCon 2005 was a sellout, and with good reason: Software vendors were jumping in for heavy participation in this open source tools platform, and the Foundation itself showed unusual cohesion with its new Roadmap 1.0. Even Microsoft showed up. At the conclusion of EclipseCon, Scott Mace talked with Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich for a progress report on some of Eclipse's 36 projects, open source licensing issues, Eclipse in academia, and more. [Opening Move with Scott Mace from IT Conversations]

[IT Conversations audio] Scott Mace talked with Bryan Field-Elliot, CTO of Ping Identity Corporation at Digital Identity World 2004. They discussed efforts to converge SAML and the Liberty Alliance standards; other big hurdles in front of widespread adoption of federated identity; understanding the different use cases driving SAML, Liberty and WS-*; the impact of the Liberty IDFF protocol's contribution to SAML 2.0; levelling the playing field between large and small technology vendors; the first email client that uses SAML; plans to further support public-key infrastructures; emerging mandates outside of health care and banking; a status report on the SourceID open-source organization; and deployment hurdles and their solutions.

Owen Davis is co-founder and president of Identity Commons. At Digital Identity World 2004, Scott Mace talked with Davis about the goals of the Identity Commons, including creating a spam-free mailbox on the Internet; why Identity Commons is a better solution than registering with a social network; how Identity Commons grew out of the OASIS XRI standard; how early revenues are funding the open source aspect of Identity Commons; allowing individuals to express their own privacy preferences via iBrokers; building on the work of P3P; the role of XDI.org; plans to interoperate with SXIP; and how Identity Commons is organized.

Dick Hardt is founder and CEO of Sxip Networks, developers of SXIP, the Simple eXtensible Identity Protocol. At Digital Identity World 2004, Scott Mace talked with Hardt about why SXIP decided to build its own federated identity system, rather than go with the SAML-based Liberty Allliance; why the mechanism of separating asserting ones' identity from the authentication mechanism is the path to true digital identities on the Web; how Slashdot karma could be an alternative currency; transferring reputations from one social network to another; where SXIP and Identity Commons complement each other, and where they compete; privacy considerations when using SAML and SXIP; and why technology such as SXIP may shape future privacy legislation.

Scott Mace's Opening Move on IT Conversations: Scott interviews David Goodman, IBM's identity strategist, who focuses on driving IBM identity management initiatives across the company. At Digital Identity World 2004, Scott Mace talked with Goodman about the Paradise Project, which spawned X.500, the first meta-directory protocol; the origin and limits of X.500's eventual successor, LDAP; the impact of social networks on identity management; the need for global name spaces; and the move to user-centric identity management. [IT Conversations audio]

Scott Mace's Opening Move on IT Conversations: Scott interviews Kim Cameron at Digital Identity World. Kim leads the development of Active Directory and Microsoft's other identity initiatives. They talk about Microsoft's new Infocard initiative, which aims to provide a common identity creation and management experience on Microsoft platforms. Scott also talks with Cameron about the lessons learned from Passport, the shortcomings of today's digital certificates, federated identities, and Cameron's own blogging plans.

Scott Mace at Medinfo 2004: Transforming health care with a focus on quality of care and patient safety has been a five-year project at Indiana University Hospital. Scott spoke with Dr. Herbert E. Cushing, chief medical officer at the hospital, and Dr. Manual Lowenhaupt, leader of the Capgemini consulting practice that worked with the hospital on this IT-driven transformation. In this conversation, both doctors discuss key success factors and the challenges facing large and small health care institutions.