My friend Marc Canter has written a series of blog posts outlining the issues, constructs, technologies, and standards required to build out an "open mesh," as he put it. It's a kind of unified field theory for the Web.
Canter has been an evangelist for a Web without walled gardens. He also has a financial stake in the open mesh. He runs a company called Broadband Mechanics that has developed a white label social network and Web site creation service that depends on open standards.
The open mesh is not Microsoft's Live Mesh. The open mesh is "made up of vendors, standards, and glue code that connects a wide range of services, applications, and platforms together," Canter said. And, it has identity at the center:
