Mike English's blog

I’ve made some slight modifications, and now I have Sixjumps‘ Facebook Connect plugin up and running on Mike English dot Net. Come check it out.

This means that you can now comment using OpenID, or by logging in through Facebook Connect. I’m all about giving you options. (If someone wants to try linking an OpenID to their profile after logging in with FB Connect, let me know. I’m curious to see how that works.)

(please be patient as I continue to tweak things – remember that this blog is a work in progress.)

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.

Why am I starting this blog now? Why start a blog at all? Aren’t there enough already?

If my goal was to jump right to the top of the “A-list” heap, starting a blog like this would be the wrong way to do it. But that’s not my goal, not at this point. Right now my goal for this space is more personal than that. I’m exploring what online identity means to me, and I’m creating balance in my life.

Balance? What does tinkering around with blogging and computers have to do with balance?

Easy, it’s my perfect hobby. The last time I really got down to the nuts and bolts of tinkering with something technical was back in highschool when the coolest (geeky) thing I could think to do was dual-booting my self-built PC and compiling unstable gentoo linux kernels with patches for devices most people didn’t have working yet. It made me happy.

Now I’m a fourth year undergraduate student studying theology at a small Midwestern Catholic university who finds most of his free-time spent reading and pondering philosophical dilemmas. While I find this immensely interesting, most of these philosophical dilemmas are as old as time, so pondering them for very long isn’t very satisfying – in fact, it can be downright depressing.

Working on a website like this offers me an opportunity to redirect my excess brainpower toward an activity that will hopefully provide some mild sense of satisfaction.

So here I am, rediscovering my predilection for technogeekery, and exploring new dimensions of self. I couldn’t be happier.

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.