I gave a talk recently about blogging (twittering, etc) and how we create online identities for ourselves. The slidecast is above. I wanted to explore some ideas, the main ones being: It is about identity, not technology X; Your identity will be constituted from several different tools/services; Your configuration and emphasis of those tools is part of what makes the identity (as well as what you put in them); An online identity is becoming default for academics now; All this is driven by really easy and diverse ways of sharing; There are numerous benefits to you as an academic. I concluded with two propositions, which you might like to disagree with: 1. Soon, your online identity will be your academic identity, 2. There is an online identity of some form out there for everyone.
I was talking with a friend of mine today who is a senior at a technology-centered high school in California. Dylan Field and his friends are by no means representative of US teens but I always love his perspective on tech practices... As someone who has argued about the challenge of Twitter being public (to all who hold power over teens), What Dylan is pointing out is that the issue is that Facebook is public (to everyone who matters) and Twitter can be private because of the combination of tools AND the fact that it's not broadly popular. My guess is that if Twitter does take off among teens and Dylan's friends feel pressured to let peers and parents and everyone else follow them, the same problem will arise and Twitter will become public in the same sense as Facebook. This of course raises a critical question: will teens continue to be passionate about systems that become "public" (to all that matter) simply because there's social pressure to connect to "everyone"?
While an individual user may use Twitter primarily as a conversational tool or a broadcast medium, in its totality, Twitter operates a lot like a wiki: as a knowledge-sharing, co-creation platform that produces content and allows its consumption. Conversation is perhaps the most simple and obvious form of collaboration, but would anyone claim that Wikipedia is a conversational platform? Despite the presence of information sharing, co-creation of an end product, and even discussion pages, Wikipedians on the whole aren't having conversations. According to this argument, Twitter is no more a conversational platform than Wikipedia is.
P. Mika. Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, 5 (1):
5 - 15(2007)Selected Papers from the International Semantic Web Conference, International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2005).