Mike English's blog

Part of my goal with this blog is to create a real home for my online identity. If you’ve known me for very long you’ve probably watched me move from one URL to the next like a hermit crab outgrowing shells. I’ve grown tired of moving from one network to the next without anyplace to really hang my hat. My solution is to attempt building myself this space.

What I’d like is something akin to what Facebook is becoming, but open. (more on that later, as I continue to figure out what exactly it is I want this to be)

An interesting thing happened this evening; I re-discovered the DiSo project, but I learned much more about it this time than I had in the past. What I found is that to really learn what the project was doing, I had to learn who exactly was working on it.

I’ve grown so accustomed to the old media of broadcasting, that I first assumed if I found the project website, I’d learn everything I needed to know. Instead, I was surprised to find that there was much more information distributed across various blogs and social networks than there was in any one centralized location. I was forced to look at the project as the work of people.

Perhaps it’s fitting that DiSo would operate in this fashion.  It gives me a lot of hope that the new forms of social media are going to put people back in control of technology and bring online social interaction back in touch with authentic personhood.

This is the hope that goes in to building this home.