Identity // Current

How's your online identity?

AdAge article. Eye-opener for our online identity. Talley Trans

TalleyTrans
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"I Will Not Lose" a Haitian Identity poem by Wilkine Brutus

Culture is a little more complex than black and white issues. Ethnic pride can often... more

wilkinebrutus
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4 days ago
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Still On the Wall: Identity Crucifixes and Christian Sensitivity

E' dalle parole di Karima Moual in "Simboli di identita' aiuto all'integrazione"... more

dia_offman
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7 days ago
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Google competes for the future; Microsoft, the past

Google was born on the Web and is increasingly giving Microsoft fits by forcing the... more

Paisano1
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19 days ago
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Worst. Surprise. Endings. Ever.

TONS of spoilers, of course, but Huffington Post picks out nine movies with the... more

ADuralde
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21 days ago
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3 comments

I’m A Writer, Not A Star-Fucker

L.A. is one tough town. This is about our blogger being stabbed in the back on the... more

jrn
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1 month ago
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Data Snatchers

Be afraid, all those private details you think are safe, well think again. Data... more

axelk
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1 month ago
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2 comments

DAIMONION - Identity vs Virtuality

Daimonion Film by Stefanie Sixt, 2009 (04:23 Min.) Background To Sokrates,... more

sixt_sense
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1 month ago
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Claiming Texican As A New Ethnicity

Due to the lack of accent, light skin and lack of any other sort of obvious... more

StrawberrieGonzoCake
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2 months ago
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2 comments

"The Bouncer in the Room" U People Story (05.08.2)

Ru Johnson is shocked at the assumption that a health services presenter has about... more

upeople
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2 months ago
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"What's the Price of the TV" U People Story (05.08.3)

Coleen just wants to buy a television but it seems that there are some questions that... more

upeople
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2 months ago
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"People Put You Inside a Box" U People Story (11.07.7)

Alba Reyes talks about how she refuses to be put into a box. U People Stories are... more

upeople
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2 months ago
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"Does Your Piercing Go To Waste" U People Story (05.08.4)

Celia explains how her queer identity remains even if she is in a relationship with a... more

upeople
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2 months ago
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Research is Key to Smart Investing

Understanding the market potential and knowing what the entrepreneur and his team may... more

Paisano1
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2 months ago
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Gender Questions Humiliate Athlete

This story is indicative of the sad and cruel world many people live in; people whose... more

Progresshiv
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3 months ago
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Personas: Representing Your Online Identity as Visual Data Portraits

Personas [media.mit.edu] uses sophisticated natural language processing algorithms to... more

RepressThis
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3 months ago
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11 comments

A (proper) Pakistani Flag!

It’s amazingly awful to see so many different versions of the Pakistani flag that it... more

fursid
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3 months ago
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Why using SSNs for identification is risky and stupid.

In a paper published last week, two Carnegie Mellon professors unveiled a method for... more

atomiclegion
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4 months ago
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3 comments

Keeping a True Identity Becomes a Battle Online

Since Facebook started giving out customized Web addresses like facebook.com/yourname last Friday, some 9.5 million people have rushed to grab their top choice.

On Twitter, public fights have broken out over so-called impostor accounts, like those that should probably be in the hands of Kanye West or Bank of America.

And somewhere out there on the Web, another new service or social network is on the rise, threatening to start yet another online land grab.

Celebrities, companies and even regular people can be excused for feeling a bit of déjà vu. Staking out and protecting their names and trademarks on the Internet has become a seemingly never-ending battle. With the rise of social networks, registering a simple Web address like pepsi.com or mileycyrus .com is no longer enough to plant one’s flag firmly in the virtual terra firma.

When domain names first became hot properties in the ’90s, it was mostly companies that worried about claiming the right addresses. But in this more narcissistic Internet era, people who were once happily anonymous view themselves as online minicelebrities with their own brands to promote.

Those whose names are not unique may run into problems in trying to manage those brands. Chris Hardwick, a stand-up comedian and host on the tech-focused cable network G4, had no trouble registering chrishardwick.com a few years ago and securing the appropriate Gmail address. But he missed out on claiming his name on MySpace to a Chris Hardwick in Ohio. Last weekend, Mr. Hardwick got home from a performance too late to get his address of choice on Facebook; he said a high school student in England appeared to have grabbed it.

“It’s like a Wild West town full of Chris Hardwicks with their hands on their mouses getting ready to draw on each other,” he said.

To some, the rules of this new game are frustratingly hazy. Facebook has invited trademark holders and celebrities who find their names are taken to fill out a complaint form on the site. It says it will resolve disputes on a case-by-case basis. While Facebook’s social network has room for many people with the same name, the new vanity addresses are being distributed on a first-come-first-served basis.

Twitter has begun verifying the identities of well-known users, giving them a badge on their pages that serves to confirm that they are who they say they are. But it has revealed little about how that process works. A Twitter spokeswoman, Jenna Sampson, said the program was a small-scale test at this point.

Tony LaRussa, manager of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team, recently sued Twitter, saying it did not do enough to prevent someone from tweeting under his name. Twitter has called the lawsuit “frivolous” and says the network shuts down accounts used by known impersonators.

Another problem is that no one knows whether any of this online terrain has any lasting value — only that accounts on sites like Twitter and Facebook tend to show up at the top of the list when people search the Web. So many people are plunging in — including so-called cybersquatters who hope to profit, financially or otherwise, from Web addresses and accounts.

Larry Winget, the author of four popular books on personal finance, has been quick over the years to get control of his name on the Web and on sites like MySpace. But last weekend, a professed fan beat him to facebook.com/larrywinget and then said he would turn it over in exchange for a face-to-face dinner.

“It’s this constant effort, this sprint, to stay ahead of the technology,” Mr. Winget said. “You’ve got to hire a person just to stay on top of it.”Since Facebook started giving out customized Web addresses like facebook.com/yourname... more

ClipsFC
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5 months ago
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New Jersey, Land Of The Poets

"there’s a number that explains it: 566, the number of municipalities in New Jersey, more per square mile than any other state. It’s the same number that explains so much else about our state — its economy, its politics, its landscape, its psychology, and why it has provided such a rich trove of stories for newspapers like this one. Poetry is compressed language, a density of meaning in a small space, and we are a compressed state, a density of communities in a small landscape.

“New Jersey’s gift to its poets,” wrote one of the other Pulitzer winners, Stephen Dunn, “is that it’s a place of many places.”

There are so many of them that the late Dave Van Ronk wrote a song, “Garden State Stomp,” whose lyrics consisted entirely of 80 of the most euphonic place names strung together in a rhyming pattern; and enough remained that he might easily have gone a few stanzas more. “Allamuchy, Hacklebarney, Rockaway, Piscataway,” he opened, and continued all the way to, “Matchaponix, Delawanna, Wawayanda, Timbuctoo.”

It’s a crazy system we have here, inefficient in the extreme and the cause of periodic handwringing, especially in years like this, when a budget crunch makes it seem an unaffordable luxury to have 566 governments serving a population roughly the same size as New York City’s, which manages with just one. A commission in Trenton — the infelicitously named Local Unit Alignment, Reorganization and Consolidation Commission — has been studying the issue for the last year. It recently recommended 26 possible mergers of North Jersey communities; the South Jersey recommendations are expected later this month.

But the commission can only recommend; it can’t undo an entrenched legacy of home rule in the state that dates back before the Revolution. It can’t force any of those 566 municipalities to share schools or police or even garbage collection with any other, let alone ask them to merge. It can’t erase the fiercely parochial bonds shared by those who remember when the mill closed, when the river rose, when the fire struck, when the high school football team won the championship.

Consolidation sounds like a reasonable idea, a rational solution to an expensive and anachronistic status quo, until it starts knocking at your own door. If your blood begins to rise at the prospect of your community joining in wedlock with one of its neighbors, then you’ve just marked yourself as a genuine New Jerseyan.

All those separate places — all 566 of them, with their costly mayors and police chiefs and school principals, but also their priceless heroes and villains, their legends and tragedies — may be bad for our wallets, but they’re essential to our identity. They are the fenced-in gardens where our abundant stories grow; and the smaller they are, the more captive the audience, the faster the stories can root and bloom.""there’s a number that explains it: 566, the number of municipalities in New Jersey,... more

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6 months ago
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tagged w/ Identity

How's your online identity?

"I Will Not Lose" a Haitian Identity poem by Wilkine Brutus

Still On the Wall: Identity Crucifixes and Christian Sensitivity

Google competes for the future; Microsoft, the past

Worst. Surprise. Endings. Ever.

I’m A Writer, Not A Star-Fucker

Data Snatchers

DAIMONION - Identity vs Virtuality

Claiming Texican As A New Ethnicity

"The Bouncer in the Room" U People Story (05.08.2)

"What's the Price of the TV" U People Story (05.08.3)

"People Put You Inside a Box" U People Story (11.07.7)

"Does Your Piercing Go To Waste" U People Story (05.08.4)

Research is Key to Smart Investing

Gender Questions Humiliate Athlete

Personas: Representing Your Online Identity as Visual Data Portraits

A (proper) Pakistani Flag!

Why using SSNs for identification is risky and stupid.

Keeping a True Identity Becomes a Battle Online

New Jersey, Land Of The Poets

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