Despite the disaster of the subprime meltdown, the old maxim -- better to own than rent -- still has enduring meaning.

We as Americans believe it, but as Americans we apply it to all our stuff -- real estate, cars, you-name-it. But we haven't applied it well to our selves, in this first nascent stage of the social Web. Hey, great, I can comment here and there, post a photo, start up pages on Yahoo, Linked In, Gmail, Second Life, MySpace and Facebook. But I've got to create those separate identities, learn different systems, update each one separately. It's like managing an Intenet Sybil, a multiple-personality confusion.

I first recall reading about the portable identity notion in Steve Rubel's
"Persuasion" blog last year. Last March. Rubel wrote about USAToday's newly socialized site (powered by Pluck), and said he liked it, but he didn't want to have to create still another persona there. He wanted to be able to take his profile created elsewhere (from his blog, MySpace, Facebook etc.) and transport it.

However, it (USAToday) doesn't go quite far enough. In addition to building these features, the media need to bridge their communities to the ones where we already spend our time. RSS, widgets and embedded content would help here. For example, USA Today should let us add our blog, Twitter or Facebook feeds or even embedded YouTube vids to our profile pages.

Connecting communities is so easy today with web services and it would go a long way toward making the their site - or any site for that matter - stronger. Hopefully we'll see this happen soon.

Made intuitive sense to me. I create my own identity on my own platform, update it as I see fit, and then place it around the web as I see fit. It's a simple idea, and one that I know, and you know, because that's how we conduct our non-digital lives.

So I read with intrigue the well-received announcement that Automattic has gotten a $29.5 million funding bump from the New York Times and others.  Around that announcement Automattic talked about where it might go -- extending its #1 personal blogging Wordpress platform farther out into the social world. That would build on anti-spam (Akismet), forums (BBPress) and avatar building (Gravatar). In sum, it looked like a direction towards enabling Me, my identity, controlled by me and placed judiciously on the web.

In its quest, Automattic has lots of competition working through the complex problems. In the social news space, Pluck, Your Hub, Topix, Clickability and YouNewsTV are among the players, and they should be working on the issue. The MySpaces, Linked Ins and Facebooks want to keep their neighborhoods fenced, but undoubtedly see the consumer want as well.  Similarly,  late-of-Friendster Jonathan Abrams has identified the same all-my-stuff-in-one-place idea with his new Socializr, with members able to create a profile and (easily) find users' photos on Flickr, their profile on MySpace and the latest entries in their Xanga blog.

I'm unsure where all these efforts are at, how close to delivering us from Sybil-hood they are. My primary identity says, the sooner, the better.