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{ Author Archives }

Dissertation Accepted

With great pride I would like to announce that my dissertation was accepted by the Graduate School at UNC-Chapel Hill yesterday. Congratulations. Your submission has cleared all of the necessary checks and will soon be delivered to UMI. Hooray! I’ve posted the entire dissertation online, with supporting materials created along the way. It is published […]

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claimID all over again

So, it seems we were onto something with claimID. Just not quite at the scale we needed back in 2005. Today, Google launched “Me on the Web” as part of their Google Dashboard. However, your online identity is determined not only by what you post, but also by what others post about you — whether […]

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My social graph is mine

Mark Pesce has done it again. He went ahead and wrote (spoke, actually, at LCA2011) what was in my head, better than I had (not) written it. He talks about how we’re social creatures, how we mimic innately (mimesis), and how to truly fight the man, we’ve got to own our information, our networks, and […]

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Happy 10th Birthday, Wikipedia

I love Wikipedia. It represents democracy in action. It represents our continual redefinitions of both truth and relevancy. It represents our ability to deal with authority in the face of a distinct lack of credentialing. It represents our best efforts to make sense of our world and to both collate and distill its essence. I […]

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Weak Passwords: Scourge of Shared Hosting

This was originally posted at the TextDrive blog on May 7, 2005. Copying here for posterity. Please consider your fellow servermates and avoid the use of weak passwords. What Not To Do Strong passwords are great. Cryptographically secure passwords are even cooler and highly encouraged. That said, under no circumstances should anyone be using something […]

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Vollis Simpson in NYTimes

In today’s NYTimes — an article about Vollis Simpson discusses his past, his hands, and his art. Kelly and I commissioned 16 whirligigs from Vollis for our wedding in 2008; 15 tabletop whirligigs for our wedding party and immediate family members, and one larger “bike wheel” for ourselves. You can see our order for the […]

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Promises and Privacy of Self-Disclosure in Online Communities

I just read the most plausible of law review papers suggesting the potential for protection of a private space within social network sites (SNS). Fellow UNC grad student Woodrow Hartzog proposes the use of Promissory Estoppel as a means to protect self-disclosure in online communities. It would create a type of contract or agreement between […]

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We Live In Public opening in NYC

A remarkable film about identity and the loss of ourselves in technology and media. Please make sure to watch this movie when you get a chance. It’s opening theatrically in NYC this Friday for the first time. I saw the film at Social Web FooCamp in April, met and spoke with Ondi and Josh, and […]

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Pseudonymy is Hard Work

I keep meaning to write down when these things happen… The march towards consolidation seems so obvious to me, and yet people are still confused when I suggest they can keep things separate. Deep Throat A few years ago now, in 2005, the world finally learned the identity of Deep Throat. He had remained pseudonymous […]

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Credentialing and Iran and Twitter

The recent and ongoing story that is the Iranian Election of 2009 has brought to the fore a variety of social media and 21st century technology issues. We’ve seen CNN get slammed (via the #CNNFail hashtag on Twitter) for not doing a timely job of covering the nascent election results and ensuing reaction on the […]

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