Last night I met Dan Pritchett, technical fellow at eBay. He told me that eBay alone has 21 identity systems.

So, if you wanted to use every part of eBay’s empire, like Skype, PayPal, StumbleUpon, etc, you’d need to sign in 21 different times.

Needless to say he, and others at eBay, are working on solving that problem.

Why did I meet up with Dan Pritchett? Because of a speech by Tim Berners Lee, the guy who invented the Web. No, Al Gore didn’t do that. Heh.

Anyway, we’ll have the videos of Tim’s talk up tomorrow. He’s thinking a lot about how to take the Web further and is working on Web research — but I’ll just let you read his blog to learn more about that. CNET has a report up of the talk he gave.

One thing I noticed is that during the talk he spent a lot of time talking about social behaviors of people. He’s clearly been studying the blog world and the social networking worlds and had a good answer to my question about what Facebook should look like in five years.

Another thing I noticed? It’s really great to be able to hear from smart people directly without having to go through intermediaries or filters anymore.

Anyway, back to the headline. How many identity systems and social networks do we need? How are we going to join them all together? I know I’m on Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Yelp, Upcoming, etc. etc. etc. — I wish they all talked with each other and all used the same sign on. Memorizing passwords is a real PITA.

Good luck to eBay and others in the efforts to join their systems together. That’s going to be some tough engineering (and political) work.

See ya tomorrow with the videos.

Dave Winer has a great post about the next step in Digg clones.

This is something I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about too.

What makes a great selection of links? Does it take a million people? Or only a handful.

I’ve been comparing my link blog to TechMeme and Digg and others enough to know that my links are pretty darn interesting. But there are times when I fall down on the job. When Milan is smiling at me, for instance. Or when I have chores. Or, when I have to speak, like I’m doing this morning at San Francisco State University, or with a bunch of journalists and famous VC’s on Wednesday night at a PRSA shindig in Silicon Valley.

One app in Facebook, FeedHeads, taught me that a small number of people can really pick some killer things. But one problem: that app is often down for me and I find I don’t trust it and it’s not fast like TechMeme is, so I usually default back to TechMeme.

The top shared item view in FeedHeads, though, is really much faster than Digg or TechMeme to get cool stuff up on it. Something about it is really intriguing.

Steve Gillmor has talked with me a lot about this, too. He’s noticed that if he chooses the news reading behaviors of only a handful of people that he can get much better results than if he has a larger group.

Why is that?

I think it’s because we like our news focused. So if we find a news junkie who thinks like us we’ll find that person to have high utility. If you put him in a group of other people his utility will go down and the noise we’ll have to slog through to find a good set of articles that interest us will go up.

That sure explains Digg and its problems to me. I used to love Digg. Now it’s just a stream of noise that largely duplicates what’s coming through my feed reader.

Google Reader tells me that over the past 30 days I’ve read 39,712 items and shared 1,045 items. The thing is that’s probably only about half of the good items cause I can’t read around the clock and have other things to do than just read feeds.

So, lets say I hooked up with five other people who picked the same kinds of items. We could hit nearly 100% of the feeds that I read (and we could add some other feeds). Five people could beat TechMeme. Why? TechMeme is slow. I often put stuff on my link blog before TechMeme gets it. If we had a team reading feeds around the clock we’d regularly beat TechMeme or Google News or Digg or Reddit or TailRank.

And we’d have less noise. At least if you liked the things the five of us pick. If you don’t, then Digg will look better to you.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying that I’m looking forward to seeing what Dave Winer does in this space. There certainly is a lot of great stuff that doesn’t get proper attention on sites like TechMeme, Digg, etc. If this effort helps great stuff get more people to read it, I’m all for it.

Question: what do you think about Digg or TechMeme or Google News or other news aggregation sites? What are you hoping to see?

I’ve read two books on it, which explains why I haven’t been on Twitter very much in the past week. But the Kindle really bugs me now. I’m hitting all sorts of little things that the Kindle team simply didn’t think through very well.

Here’s my one-week review of Amazon’s Kindle.

I focus on a few areas:

1. No ability to buy paper goods from Amazon through Kindle.
2. Usability sucks. They didn’t think about how people would hold this device.
3. UI sucks. Menus? Did they hire some out-of-work Microsoft employees?
4. No ability to send electronic goods to anyone else. I know Mike Arrington has one. I wanted to send him a gift through this of Alan Greenspan’s new book. I couldn’t. That’s lame.
5. No social network. Why don’t I have a list of all my friends who also have Kindles and let them see what I’m reading?
6. No touch screen. The iPhone has taught everyone that I’ve shown this to that screens are meant to be touched. Yet we’re stuck with a silly navigation system because the screen isn’t touchable.

Would I buy it? Yes, but I’m a geek. I can’t really recommend this to other people yet. Sorry.

It’s obvious that they never had this device in their hands when they were designing it.

Whoever designed this should be fired and the team should start over.

Last night I met Cathy Brooks. She’s helping plan the LeWeb3 conference. I trust her opinion and she’s whip smart.

I showed her the Amazon Kindle device and asked her which book should be my first book I read on it. She recommended “Basic Black” by Cathie Black. She has been on the executive teams for a lot of publishing efforts from USA Today to Oprah’s new, and highly successful, “O” magazine.

I did something that I’ve never been able to do before. I bought the book right in front of her.

When I got home I started reading — I got about halfway through the book. I can see why Cathy recommended this book. Lots of great lessons about business and stories about the publishing industry, something I’m interested in.

Anyway, this morning I did a little video comparison to “real” books. I compared it to Blue Planet Run, a photo book that Rick Smolan just sent me (he’s a famous photographer who we’ll have on Photowalking someday if we can match our schedules up).

Hopefully this will be the last of my Kindle posts. Onto other things.

Here’s my first use of the Amazon Kindle. I buy TechCrunch. All at the beach, er Half Moon Bay Ritz.

Then I find out there’s a browser which actually is better than buying blogs. Ahh, too bad Mike, you won’t get my $.60! :-)

I bought the New York Times, too.

What was great was there’s no setup at all. It comes pre set up. Very cool. Jeff Bezos even said “welcome Robert.” Heheh.

I have another video coming soon where I walked around the neighborhood with it.

Oh, and Mike, thanks for giving us bloggers all a vacation! Just what we need to play more with our Kindle’s!

What’s really fun is that if you buy TechCrunch you don’t get the comments, but if you get the free version you get comments!

UPDATE: here’s my walk around the neighborhood while using the Kindle for the first time too. In my walk video you see what the screen is like in sunlight and shaded light.

Oh, and James Kendrick gives you his video first impressions too.

Photowalking with Thomas Hawk is grand, but today we have a real treat: a photowalk with a real professional photographer. Marc Silber. He even has the license plates to prove it! It’s long, but not boring. Just in case you don’t have the hour to spend Rocky made you a short and sweet editor’s choice for you.

Marc has written an eBook on how to take better photos, and we talk about some of the tips in the book. You’ll learn a lot on this hour walk. Plus you get to see some great scenery on a ridge above Palo Alto/Silicon Valley and hear some stories about the property because Marc used to live on the property, which is now a public park.

Oh, and I did almost the entire hour by walking backward. It’s a skill that only my parents would be proud of.

Thank you to Seagate for sponsoring my show and supporting digital photography through not only their storage devices but also by supporting my efforts to do educational photowalks like this.

Seth Godin: “You won’t find me on Amazon’s new book reader.”

Rex Hammock: “I’d rather have an iPod Touchbook.”

Mathew Ingram: WTF?

Jeremy Toeman: It will fail.

My thoughts?

That Jeremy is probably right. I’m excited about the new reader to be sure. But getting geeks like me excited by a new “shiny toy” is pretty easy. Getting a large market excited? That’s a LOT harder.

Why am I excited by this? Because it brings some very real advances to devices. Is it too expensive? For many people, yes. But one thing I’ve learned is that if something in the technology industry is too expensive today just stay alive for a few years. I remember when Steve Wozniak had a color printer that cost $40,000 that today’s $70 printers are better than.

For $400 this device is pretty damn remarkable. It can be read out in bright sunlight (my $3,000 Mac can’t do that). Its battery lasts dozens of hours. It’s a joy to use for the stated purpose: reading.

I do agree with Seth and Mathew: I really wish they had found a way to give away a stack of books and other content (including blogs). I told them almost the exact same thing Seth did and, yes, my words were just as unsuccessful at hitting the mark.

That said, even if Jeff Bezos turns out to be a failure here this device will push the market simply by getting you all to consider a world where you read your books off of a screen rather than off of paper. To me that’s interesting.

One other thing I told the team? Get Google Reader onto this thing. In fact, I tried to get my link blog onto it instead of just my blog (and I pitched them to include TechMeme, Digg, and Slashdot, among others, on it). We’ll see later today what they decided, but I don’t think they got the link blog onto it.

Russia has gone from a poor country to an increasingly wealthy one. Why? Oil prices. Now that oil is sitting around $100 a barrel Russia is sitting on a gold mine. Er, oil wells. And the cash is pouring in. One problem? They need to diversify and increase the number of companies that don’t have anything to do with energy. So, they are starting up a bunch of Venture Capital efforts.

I get the skinny on all this with Yuri Ammosov, a senior policy officer of the Russian Government in charge of venture capital and high tech development programs, talks with me about how Russia is flush with cash thanks to the rising energy prices (they are one of the world’s leading oil producers) and are working with Silicon Valley venture capital firms to diversify its economy. We talk about some of the smart people and smart companies that are popping up in Russia and tons of other stuff too.

I like his honesty. He told me that being an entrepreneur in Russia today is like being an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley in the 1960s (when Silicon Valley was still largely a farm town).

Scoble’s wrong. At least that’s what a good number of commenters say on my post yesterday.

On Sunday night I was being interviewed by Guy Kawasaki at the Stanford Publishing Course. Lots of famous publishers in the audience, including Scott Karp, who captured a few minutes with his video camera, and I told them this is why I like online media: it’s two way.

In old media if you see an idiot on TV you can’t effectively yell back. Today you can and I think that’s freaking awesome.

How do I know I really was wrong? Christopher Coulter agreed with me in those comments. He never agrees with me so I MUST have been wrong! :-)

Wired blog has the details on the robotic car race. Tartan Racing (joint effort of General Motors and CMU) came in first, Stanford University, second. Two million dollar and one million dollar prizes, respectively.

Anyway, if you didn’t catch this interview, now might be a great time. It’s with the guy who runs the algorithms on Stanford’s entry.

This is a 60-mile race that is completed by computers. Pretty darn cool technology and a pretty big challenge for computers and the people who program them.

UPDATE: Popular Mechanics has details on the winners.