What does Identity technologies, tagging, creative commons licensing and (rich) media have to do with each other? Why would anyone want to combine them?

Well, the richer the media, the more tagging goes to 100%, and the more the media means to the maker, the more likely they are to want to post it on their own sites. That means media makers need better tools to participate in a rich community, especially if they are podcasting and vlogging. But they may not want to be the exhibitionists some early-adopter bloggers are, and they might want lots more flexibility in their tools than current tagging tools allow. They want it all (but not too much!) and they want it flexible. Because larger pieces of media means the drop off rate for those rich media item's urls and files is much more ephemeral than you might think.

This standard emerged in part because of conversations between the developers of XRI, an OASIS open standard for unique identifiers, usability engineers and developers of rich media tools. It is by no means dependent on the XRI standard as any URL based identity can also be used, such as a blog URL.

i-tags is a tool that can solve user's and aggregator's problems. And it's the first use outside of single sign-on we've seen for identity tools, that regular folks can use on their own sites. Additionally video tool makers have expressed keen interest in collecting i-tags from users.