Yesterday was my last day at Microsoft. You can read more at Dick Hardt dot org.

Now that I am not constrained by Microsoft policies, I plan on writing about a variety of topics that have been bubbling in my head for the past year. OpenID v Next, Company Culture, Online Privacy etc.

As for this site, the “2.0″ branding seems so last decade now. I will be putting this identity into stasis and doing all my new writing at Dick Hardt dot org, where I will discuss how digital identity is becoming reality.

Eric Norlin (hey update that blog!) has a new conference Defrag. I twisted his arm so that I could be one of the speakers so that I could be cool and hang out with all the great speakers. This is going to be one of those inciteful conferences that have a relatively small number of attendees and high signal to noise ration.  Those in the identity space will recall that Eric was at Ping Identity and is still working with DIDW. If you register before August 22, you have a 1/10 chance of winning a new iMac.

I gave a talk on Identity 2.0 at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam. Although the organizers are not professional conference organizers, it was pretty wll run, and they were great hosts! The attendees where the tuned in digirati from around Europe and the presenter lineup was pretty good. My talk on identity was well received and referenced by a number of the other speakers. There seemed to be general consensus that identity is an important part of the future of the web, and the OpenID is the thought leading technology.

Presentations from emerging companies was part of the conference. Like any of these event, there was a broad spectrum of quality. The presenting companies were ranked by a couple of grumpy old men off to the side: Marc Cantor being the more grumpy of the two. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch was supposed to be there, but did not make it.

At the end of the conference, just prior to a crazy party at the Odeon, the Next Web awards were announced. We had entered Sxipper into the highly competitive beta category (Joost won). OpenID won the disruptors category, displacing Joost, Netvibes.