Who is the bene?¬?ciary of
that help? In the case of a public website, it will be the ???public???
itself. Everybody that is not the website itself or, as Kim solipsistically
put it in the white paper, ???all the other identities.???
We call that kind of identity omnidirectional. It is an identity
meant to be understood by everybody. This identity will contain
the info necessary for the public to decide if they want to do
business with it. X.509 certi?¬?cates and associated URLs are the
most natural example in this context, but the instances in the
of?¬‚ine world abound. You may have seen at some conferences
those badges that display the attendee name, the company he or
she is af?¬?liated with, his or her role in the conference (attendee,
speaker, staff), and the languages he or she can speak. That information
is beamed to everybody coming within visual range
of the badge and helps everyone else to recognize the bearer
and the methods of interaction. The Web 2.0 breeze that blows
on the Internet these days brings many means of doing the same
thing online. For example, at the time of writing, Opinity
(www.opinity.com) offers to its users a unique URL that provides
the function of omnidirectional identi?¬?er.
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