Manage your online identity.

If nothing else, we hope that ClaimID has helped you think about the identity you “create” online.  It is important to think about this, as online identity is new - we haven’t got everything worked out yet.  The records we leave behind are not only of our production (Blogs, emails) but also the side effects of our consumption (Last.fm playlists, del.icio.us bookmarks).  Never before has so much of our consumption and production been so public.  In a very interesting set of posts, Tara Hunt and Nicole Simon explore the concept of subscribing to a person.

Hunt says:

I have littered pieces of myself all over the web, in varying identities, avatars, pseudonyms, passwords and logins. I don’t want to start getting into the identity stuff, ’cause I could give a damn about single sign on. Seriously, sometimes I just want to dabble. I also have various degrees of interest where I have littered my being. And I most certainly don’t want to commit to one place for all of my ’stuff’ - I like variety. So, let’s not go there.

What I wouldn’t mind, though, is the ability to watch all of it. Watch who watches me. Watch someone else and who watches them. I want to subscribe to a person, as much or as little as interests me.

Simon responds by exploring systems of how we subscribe to people - and what it means when we do subscribe to someone.

And just because I read your blog and listen to your podcast does not automatically mean that I qualify as a contact / buddy. But my request may have been nicely written and so you want not to just say no - and let it lay there for some while. And probably forget about it.

It may be hard for us to grasp that we are micro-celebrities to our peers.  We may find it hard to believe that our del.icio.us links or last.fm playlists could interest our friends - or complete strangers.  The fact is, however, that they do.  We are infinitely interesting to each other - what we share online gives people a different, unique perspective into our identity. We struggle with the fact that complete strangers can use this information just as our friends would, but this is the challenge of coming to terms with online identity.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 15th, 2006 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Dispatches from a beta, claimID.