Who are you, and who can you trust, when anyone can be anyone, anywhere?
Reputation and Identity are two key issues that will help shape the future of interactive media: We will cross the marketing/socio-cultural interactive Rubicon when we personally manage a single unified identity, portable site to site and experience to experience, and when we have access to our own unified online reputation, whose sharing we control. These two combined will give weight, credibility and personal responsibility for the full spectrum of my interactive activity.
Attached is a video of a presentation delivered by Dick Hardt @ O'Reilly web conference entitiled "Idenity 2.0":
In 10 minutes, I came up with this non-exhaustive list of elements of my online personality. In each I was required to register or provide info so as to allow for creation of an account, or 'persistent presence'. For the most part, each exists independently from the others, and a change to one does not inform the others.
- MySpace
- Flickr
- Dopplr
- Second Life
- XBox Live
- Typepad
- Google (gmail, groups, etc.)
- Ning
- eBay
- Amazon
- Yahoo (fantasy sports, email)
- Nokia (nseries.com)
- iMedia
- Pandora
- LastFM
- BMW motorcycles
- Ad Age
- Skype
- AOL (IM)
- iChat (yep, and .mac)
- Jafrun (helmets)
- iTunes
- NetVibes
Each of these places has a bit of me. And, for the most part, I am "me" on them - no pseudonyms, pen names, what have you. So you can track me back to "me". Which can lead to problems, as people may choose to use your efforts for their own ends, as evidenced by these two bits recently run:
Two related posts
[from How to Split an Atom]
"if someone is angry, joking or drunk you could find yourself “tweeting” something that is later picked up as absolute truth...it becomes true because the statement can be sourced back to a name with credibility...[and] once you get quoted — very few people are going to check back to see the context. Without context, mole-hills become mountains pretty quickly."
[from textually.org]
TV ad points to a new form of negative campaigning in which information is sourced to comments posted on the Internet instead of news reports or public records. The Washington Post reports.
"Del. Timothy D. Hugo, a Republican state legislator from Fairfax County has launched an attack ad on cable TV against his Democratic opponent that features unidentified, unverified quotes from a blog.
This is one of the places where the old way of doing politics and the new way is coming into conflict," said David Weinberger, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
... Karen S. Johnson-Cartee, a political science professor at the University of Alabama who has written several books on negative television ads, said Hugo's ad "means we have sunk to a new low. ... Most people, especially older Americans, are unfamiliar with the blogs," Johnson-Cartee said. "They have no way of testing the veracity of something posted on a blog."
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