"Emerging Telephony is actually the end of telephony."

I listened to a short and relatively old (from the 2006 O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference) podcast and this quote appears in the first 90 seconds. That was enough to hold my attention for the next 15 minutes or so. The title of the podcast is "Auto-buddies: Connecting Relevant Strangers."

The speaker is Lee Dryburgh and he is a self-described telecommunications protocol engineer who is on a journey to seek value in the connections that the protocols enable. His web site goes into quite some details about what he talked about at this conference.

He talks a lot about context sensitive attribute assertion with a not yet articulated but important to have authenticity. He ties it into reputation (one of my favorite topics) and how this can all make for a much richer digital experience that also leads into a richer analog experience, particularly when tying this all into proximity. This is where, I think, Cole Camplese's recent blog posting "The Intranet — Gee, That’s Exciting" might very well collide nicely with some of the work that comes out of the Penn State Identity and Access Management Group.

Many of the concepts I've heard/thought/discussed before but his take was different enough to be provocative. If you haven't thought about these kinds of things before, it is a good 15 minute listen.