Quora:

I'm still not sure if I'm claiming to be a pragmatic designer with this title, or merely to be offering a guide for other people who might consider themselves pragmatic designers.

In any case, the title was largely a way to narrow what is potentially a huge topic—identity on the web—to something I could reasonably talk about in an hour. Really, it should have been called something like: "An idealistic designer trying very hard to be pragmatic about one subject and partially succeeding. The subject is the user experience of identifiers and authentication, and this is a partial picture at best, but it's possible that the audience will end up a little more educated after the presentation than they were at the beginning." But that's not very succinct.

I gave this talk in May at WebVisions 2010 in Portland. WebVisions is fabulous. I don't think I'm done with this topic—I assigned it to myself because I thought I had some learning to do, and learned, but there's more I'd like to learn. Plus, stuff keeps changing.

Missing from the SlideShare presentation are the breathless ranting and manic handwaving that are characteristic of my presentation style.