Dick Hardt of Sxip Identity gave a recent keynote at O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference titled Identity2.0. The presentation has been made available in Flash, Quicktime and Windows Media and is a very intersting look at the future of digital identity.

As the online world moves towards Web 2.0, the concept of digital identity is evolving, and existing identity systems are falling behind. New systems are emerging that place identity in the hands of users instead of directories. Simple, secure and open, these systems will provide the scalable, user-centric mechanism for authenticating and managing real-world identities online, enabling truly distinct and portable Internet identities.

The Pragmatic Programmers have just released their latest beta book – Pragmatic Ajax. This is an opportunity to purchase and download the book before it’s released and get regular updates as the book is perfected and finalized.

Web designer Zoe Gillenwater has a great tutorial that will help Cure Float Drops and Wraps a phenomenon where one block drops down below the other one instead of sitting side-by-side as you anticipated.

Scuttlebut has it that Sun and Google will annouce a collaboration to bring StarOffice productivity applications to Google users. Looks like MS is going to be seeing some pretty big competition over the next bit in the OS, Browser and now Office Suite space.

Gary Edwards, a consultant and designated representative of the OpenOffice.org is quoted in the article and says:

“Imagine StarOffice running on the desktop, and Google perfecting the [file synchronization],” said Edwards. “Then you have your collaboration space carved out immediately for you, and Google is hosting it.”

RadRails is an integrated development environment for the Ruby on Rails framework. The goal of the project is to enhance the rails development experience. RadRails seeks to make life simpler by providing rails developers with a single point to manage multiple projects, take advantage of source control and deploy their applications. The IDE is cross platform supporting Windows, OSX and Linux.

SQL Designer is an excellent example of what can be done in today’s browser with some JavaScript and HTML. This tool let’s you visually create your database schema and export it to XML that can then be used to create your database in MySQL.

Yahoo! Site Explorer is a cool beta offering from Yahoo that allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page.

You can check out the most popular pages at my site here.

Treehouse is a new web development and design magazine that is available on in PDF format. This magazine is from the same people who created the now defunct Design in Flight magazine, so the quality of the publication is up to the same standards. You can preview the first edition for free.

37 Signals (the creators of Basecamp, Backpack and TaDa Lists) have just released their latest effort – Writeboard

Writeboard is an web-based collaborative writing application that lets you write, share, revise, rollback and compare the documents that you create. Some of the features include:

• Write without fear of losing or overwriting a good idea
• Compare different versions of a document
• Collaborate with colleagues on copy, proposals, memos, etc.
• Subscribe to documents via RSS and be notified of changes
• Keep your writings organized with Backpack integration

Writeboard is perfect for…

• Authors, journalists, PR folks, editors, and publishers
• Bloggers or freelance/independent writers
• Letter writers, songwriters, poets, comedians, creatives
• Students, professors, and groups collaborating on a paper

Google Blogoscoped is reporting that a new Google subdomain – calendar.google.com is now active and maybe an indication that Google is about to release a web-based calendar application. Hopefully Google will do to online calendaring, what gmail has done for web-based mail.