Archive for the ‘beta’ tag
identity
What does identity mean online?
In the past, the most important moniker for online identity was your e-mail address. This is changing. Identity is increasingly being defined not by e-mail address, but by URL. It doesn’t matter anymore where your mailbox is, but what property you actually inhabit on the web.
If you can prove you control a URL, then you have an identity you can use across the web. OpenID is the new definitive standard for exactly this. It’s a sort of handshake for verifying ownership of these online properties.
If you hadn’t already noticed, this blog is OpenID enabled. That means that anyone with an OpenID can easily leave a comment, automatically including whatever identifying information they’ve set their provider to pass along. It also means that I can use this blog as an OpenID. When the Internet asks, “Who are you?” I can respond, “I’m http://mikeenglish.net/blog/, nice to make your acquaintance.” – only, is that best representation of who I am?
A URL provides two forms of information, first, the semantic information that may or may not exist in the URL itself, and second, the content available at the URL. Populating and configuring this blog will constitute the second half of that information, but what about the first part, what does it mean to be http://mikeenglish.net/blog/?
Why not just http://mikeenglish.net? In fact, I’ve already starting using http://mikeenglish.net as an OpenID. It’s simple and straightforward. Right now visiting that URL brings you a page with my name on it. I recently made it a hyperlink, and it links to this blog.
Why didn’t I install wordpress to the root of the domain, why does this blog live at /blog? Maybe it’s because I’m not sure what this will become, I’m not sure I’m ready to be so directly identified with something that’s still experimental, something that’s still evolving and growing. And yet, providing a home for my online identity is exactly why I’ve created this blog. Perhaps then, the relegating of this content to /blog should be taken as a gesture that the development of my online identity is still in early beta.
