Amy added http://linked-research.270a.info/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Amy added http://csarven.ca/statistical-linked-dataspaces#linked-data-pages to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Amy added https://explorable.com/research-designs to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Amy added https://nomadlist.com/stories/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Amy added https://medium.com/message/the-hypocrisy-of-the-internet-journalist-587d33f6279e to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Amy added http://csarven.ca/linked-research to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Amy added http://hdiresearch.org/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Amy added http://www.amazon.co.uk/books/dp/0759100519 to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Amy added http://www.smallbusiness.co.uk/news/outlook/2485411/quality-of-data-suffers-as-consumers-are-reluctant-to-disclose-personal-information.thtml to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Amy added https://gist.github.com/aaronpk/40d6bb333447ff4265a4 to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Amy added https://linkeddata.github.io/SoLiD/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Amy added http://www.digital-selfdefense.com/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Amy added https://medium.com/@zip/my-name-is-only-real-enough-to-work-at-facebook-not-to-use-on-the-site-c37daf3f4b03 to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Amy added http://datasets-satin.telecom-st-etienne.fr/aboutet/DeSN15/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
3.81 miles, gps on runkeeper: first run since I've been back in Edinburgh. Might make sunset runs a thing.
Amy wrote about life, edinburgh, running, arthur's seat, holyrood, & whereirun
Amy added 'PHAIDRA INTERNATIONAL' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'Emphasis Update and Source - NYTimes.com' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'Adventures in Semantic Publishing: Exemplar Semantic Enhancements of a Research Article' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'Journal Selector' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'News Challenge - How can we strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation? - Opening up research proposals' to Bookmarks
Attempt three to get to Oxford. I have to stop pre-booking train tickets. First Great Western owes me dinner.
Awkward silence. Relax into it. Make it your own. Become the silence. Now you can do anything.
Ben Lawers (from Lawers) and back in 4.5 hours today. The clouds cleared up on the way down. Learnt some stuff about rocks. ![The Summit](https://rhiaro.co.uk/photos/1506firbush/150620_benlawers.jpg) 7 miles, but Runkeeper doesn't know about altitude... ([GPS trace](http://rnkpr.com/a9uy42o)).
Ben Lawers (from Lawers) and back in 4.5 hours today. The clouds cleared up on the way down. Learnt some stuff about rocks. 7 miles, but Runkeeper doesn't know about altitude... (GPS trace).
Amy wrote about travel, uk, scotland, highlands, ben lawers, & firbush
The best thing about the Chromebook is that whenever I open any google product, regardless of whatever else is running, everything crashes.
Amy wrote about google, chromebook, & chromeos
A big reason for use of personas online is experimentation and self-exploration - [@emax](http://twitter.com/emax)
A big reason for use of personas online is experimentation and self-exploration - @emax
Amy wrote about privacy, identity, social media, websci15, emax, & online personas
Cakes on the tables probably doesn't hurt either
Come to Online Behaviours session next to see [@emax](http://twitter.com/emax) present our paper about lying and deception on social media!
Come to Online Behaviours session next to see @emax present our paper about lying and deception on social media!
# "CV"@en-gb / "Resumৢ@en-us For years I relied on PDFs and LinkedIn to share my professional experiences. But I am of the Web. I can no longer live this lie. I have backdated a series of blog posts containing the kind of information one might expect to find on a CV. They are all tagged with [cv](/tag/cv) and [resume](/tag/resume) (look, i18n) so you can use this to view them together in chronological order of start date. They also have other related tags, which you can use to explore each particular entry in more detail if I blogged about it at the time (which is hit and miss). It's not organised quite like a traditional CV, with things clustered into categories like '[education](/tag/education)' or '[work experience](/tag/work)' - as such, it's not very good for skimming - but I'm sure you'll cope. As each entry is a normal post, people can reply to them (via webmention). I might solicit some references for certain positions and add them as replies. Feel free to also reply to this post with general recommendations. Take that, LinkedIn!
For years I relied on PDFs and LinkedIn to share my professional experiences. But I am of the Web. I can no longer live this lie. I have backdated a series of blog posts containing the kind of information one might expect to find on a CV. They are all tagged with cv and resume (look, i18n) so you can use this to view them together in chronological order of start date. They also have other related tags, which you can use to explore each particular entry in more detail if I blogged about it at the time (which is hit and miss). It's not organised quite like a traditional CV, with things clustered into categories like 'education' or 'work experience' - as such, it's not very good for skimming - but I'm sure you'll cope. As each entry is a normal post, people can reply to them (via webmention). I might solicit some references for certain positions and add them as replies. Feel free to also reply to this post with general recommendations. Take that, LinkedIn!
I didn't realise I'd find making an android app with a picture of a cat that meows when you tap it so satisfying.
Amy wrote about bcs, android, world record attempt, appathon, & appinventor
Does an open market for personal data take away our ability to make autonomous decisions? -[@rdbinns](http://twitter.com/RDBinns)
Does an open market for personal data take away our ability to make autonomous decisions? -@rdbinns
Amy wrote about privacy, websci15, & personal data
Effect of requiring authentication - "blandification". Conformity effect. THIS IS HORRIFYING. But unsurprising. (Rolf Fredheim, Alfred Moore, John Naughton)
Amy wrote about phd, privacy, identity, social media, websci15, online personas, & anonymity
# ESWC2015 This is a summary of a few bits and pieces that stood out to me from ESWC2015. I haven't covered every session I attended or paper I saw, just the ones that remained with me (other people will do full summaries of all the paper sessions I'm sure, or you can refer to [the programme](http://2015.eswc-conferences.org/program) or [Fabien Gandon's closing slides](http://www.slideshare.net/fabien_gandon/eswc-2015-closing-and-general-chairs-minute-of-madness) which have an excellent summary). For a more 'live' overview of my view on the conference you can see [everything I posted during it](https://rhiaro.co.uk/tag/eswc2015). Overall, I had a great experience, met some fantastic people and absorbed lots of interesting ideas. I feel more positive about work in linked data; I'd been slacking off following the community for a while, but I've been reassured that there are plenty of practical-minded researchers out there who are doing great things, and I'll be paying more attention again henceforth. Daily swims in the sea probably didn't hurt. ## SemDev2015 The developers workshop was great, full of people positive about building tools and applications, and finding ways to make the power of linked data accessible to actual end users. The focus was on building for web developers rather than on end-user applications, with projects being great libraries and tooling for working with linked data, as a way to bridge the gap. There was an air of frankness, with attendees keen to address problems openly, without handwaving or glossing over things that weren't working out. There was even live debugging during presentations. [Here's the program, with links to projects and repos](http://eswc2015.semdev.org/program/). I missed the final discussion session, but this was [recorded](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4WN4XEpViA) and I hear it was good. ## Philoweb For a philosophy of the web workshop, the talks and discussions during this workshop were around pretty pragmatic issues. In particular how we can obtain true decentralisation, problems with centralised DNS and internet infrastructure, the lack of attention paid in this community to security issues, and the importance of understanding social processes and current practice for ensuring the web continues to function and that we don't "break it by accident" (Henry Thompson). These aren't things that tend to get much of a forum at conferences like ESWC, but semantic web academics being at the forefront of a truly linked information space should definitely be encouraged to think about the effects of our work on society, particularly underprivileged and minorities. ## USEWOD This workshop - [usage analysis and the web of data](http://usewod.org/usewod2015.html) - had a general focus on understanding and getting the most out of the web as we know it today, in order to shape the web we want in the future. As well as traditional paper submissions, they were also accepting submissions via blog posts, and will continue to accept articles on an ongoing basis, which is a great way to keep the discussion alive. I was gutted to miss [Max van Kleek's](http://hip.cat) keynote ["Not in my Castle"](http://usewod.org/files/workshops/2015/papers/USEWOD15_vankleek.pdf) because I got the timing wrong, but I hear it was awesome. ## In Use & Industry Harry Halpin and Francesca Bria worked on an interesting project to map social innovation projects (like hacklabs, open data initiatives, community enterprises) across Europe. It wouldn't have been strictly necessary to use linked data for this, and doing so might have actually caused the site to be pretty slow. However, it allowed them to do a bunch of interesting network analysis on the hundreds of different projects and organisations mapped and gain some insights into how to strengthen such initiatives (for example, by increasing collaboration opportunities). Also, I suspect technologies for building sites on the back of linked data have probably improved quite a bit since this work was started, so the speed issue might easy to overcome. I paid attention cos I'm generally interested in putting stuff on maps but I'd really like to see more decentralised mapping things; projects/organisations publishing their information independently as linked data, such that they're in control over what's available, rather than having to submit their info to a centralised service. ## Crowdsourcing and web science Seyi Feyisetan from Southampton discussed different factors that affected the performance of crowd workers, by looking at features of the tasks themselves rather than the platform or rewards, when asking workers to classify entities in tweets. It was suggested that their results could be used to work out if NER on your microposts dataset would be better performed by machine, human experts or crowdworkers, depending on the contents of the dataset. Revanthy Krishnamurthy presented about using general background knowledge and the contents of tweets to detect the location of twitter users, as most twitter users don't have geolocation enabled when posting. They did smart stuff like correlating mentions of events, landmarks and slang terms with physical places, but I don't remember them saying much about respecting the privacy of people who actively don't use geolocation.. ## Demos The demos and poster session I thought was particularly lively. I liked that it didn't overlap with any other sessions, and breakfast cakes and fruit were distributed through the demos area. It was pretty cramped though, and possibly would have been better off earlier in the week too (it was in the morning of the last day). I appreciate the principles and technologies behind [Sarven Capadisli's](http://csarven.ca/#i) [Linked Research](http://linked-research.270a.info) project, to the point that I implemented it for [one of my own papers](https://rhiaro.co.uk/pub/cim14) immediately. Encouraging web scientists to publish their research using the native web stack, using RDF to make research queryable and discoverable on a more granular level - in other words, to practice what we preach - is a worthy goal. And it was really easy to set up. Everyone should do it. Entity annotation isn't something I know much about, but I think I understood a bit more after talking to [Ricardo Usbeck](http://aksw.org/RicardoUsbeck.html) about [GERBIL](http://aksw.org/Projects/GERBIL.html), a tool for evaluating entity annotators. This easy to use online tool lets you compare some of the different annotators available against different types of datasets, to see which would perform the best for your particular use case, without you needing to access any of the test datasets yourself (as you often have to pay for licenses). You just plug your annotator in and leave it running, and it returns results. This also allowed them to check reported results of popular annotators and compare them according to different standards, for a more well rounded view of their capabilities. I dunno if the preceding paragraph made much sense, but that's what I got. ## Other Had some great discussions about microformats, RDFa, schema.org, federated/decentralised social web stuff and whatnot. I was also approached by a bunch of people who knew who I was from reading my [WWW2015 post](https://rhiaro.co.uk/2015/05/www2015) o.O Which was weird, but most people seemed to like it.. Finally, this was one of the better catered conferences I've been to, so props for that :)
This is a summary of a few bits and pieces that stood out to me from ESWC2015. I haven't covered every session I attended or paper I saw, just the ones that remained with me (other people will do full summaries of all the paper sessions I'm sure, or you can refer to the programme or Fabien Gandon's closing slides which have an excellent summary). For a more 'live' overview of my view on the conference you can see everything I posted during it. Overall, I had a great experience, met some fantastic people and absorbed lots of interesting ideas. I feel more positive about work in linked data; I'd been slacking off following the community for a while, but I've been reassured that there are plenty of practical-minded researchers out there who are doing great things, and I'll be paying more attention again henceforth. Daily swims in the sea probably didn't hurt. SemDev2015 The developers workshop was great, full of people positive about building tools and applications, and finding ways to make the power of linked data accessible to actual end users. The focus was on building for web developers rather than on end-user applications, with projects being great libraries and tooling for working with linked data, as a way to bridge the gap. There was an air of frankness, with attendees keen to address problems openly, without handwaving or glossing over things that weren't working out. There was even live debugging during presentations. Here's the program, with links to projects and repos. I missed the final discussion session, but this was recorded and I hear it was good. Philoweb For a philosophy of the web workshop, the talks and discussions during this workshop were around pretty pragmatic issues. In particular how we can obtain true decentralisation, problems with centralised DNS and internet infrastructure, the lack of attention paid in this community to security issues, and the importance of understanding social processes and current practice for ensuring the web continues to function and that we don't "break it by accident" (Henry Thompson). These aren't things that tend to get much of a forum at conferences like ESWC, but semantic web academics being at the forefront of a truly linked information space should definitely be encouraged to think about the effects of our work on society, particularly underprivileged and minorities. USEWOD This workshop - usage analysis and the web of data - had a general focus on understanding and getting the most out of the web as we know it today, in order to shape the web we want in the future. As well as traditional paper submissions, they were also accepting submissions via blog posts, and will continue to accept articles on an ongoing basis, which is a great way to keep the discussion alive. I was gutted to miss Max van Kleek's keynote "Not in my Castle" because I got the timing wrong, but I hear it was awesome. In Use & Industry Harry Halpin and Francesca Bria worked on an interesting project to map social innovation projects (like hacklabs, open data initiatives, community enterprises) across Europe. It wouldn't have been strictly necessary to use linked data for this, and doing so might have actually caused the site to be pretty slow. However, it allowed them to do a bunch of interesting network analysis on the hundreds of different projects and organisations mapped and gain some insights into how to strengthen such initiatives (for example, by increasing collaboration opportunities). Also, I suspect technologies for building sites on the back of linked data have probably improved quite a bit since this work was started, so the speed issue might easy to overcome. I paid attention cos I'm generally interested in putting stuff on maps but I'd really like to see more decentralised mapping things; projects/organisations publishing their information independently as linked data, such that they're in control over what's available, rather than having to submit their info to a centralised service. Crowdsourcing and web science Seyi Feyisetan from Southampton discussed different factors that affected the performance of crowd workers, by looking at features of the tasks themselves rather than the platform or rewards, when asking workers to classify entities in tweets. It was suggested that their results could be used to work out if NER on your microposts dataset would be better performed by machine, human experts or crowdworkers, depending on the contents of the dataset. Revanthy Krishnamurthy presented about using general background knowledge and the contents of tweets to detect the location of twitter users, as most twitter users don't have geolocation enabled when posting. They did smart stuff like correlating mentions of events, landmarks and slang terms with physical places, but I don't remember them saying much about respecting the privacy of people who actively don't use geolocation.. Demos The demos and poster session I thought was particularly lively. I liked that it didn't overlap with any other sessions, and breakfast cakes and fruit were distributed through the demos area. It was pretty cramped though, and possibly would have been better off earlier in the week too (it was in the morning of the last day). I appreciate the principles and technologies behind Sarven Capadisli's Linked Research project, to the point that I implemented it for one of my own papers immediately. Encouraging web scientists to publish their research using the native web stack, using RDF to make research queryable and discoverable on a more granular level - in other words, to practice what we preach - is a worthy goal. And it was really easy to set up. Everyone should do it. Entity annotation isn't something I know much about, but I think I understood a bit more after talking to Ricardo Usbeck about GERBIL, a tool for evaluating entity annotators. This easy to use online tool lets you compare some of the different annotators available against different types of datasets, to see which would perform the best for your particular use case, without you needing to access any of the test datasets yourself (as you often have to pay for licenses). You just plug your annotator in and leave it running, and it returns results. This also allowed them to check reported results of popular annotators and compare them according to different standards, for a more well rounded view of their capabilities. I dunno if the preceding paragraph made much sense, but that's what I got. Other Had some great discussions about microformats, RDFa, schema.org, federated/decentralised social web stuff and whatnot. I was also approached by a bunch of people who knew who I was from reading my WWW2015 post o.O Which was weird, but most people seemed to like it.. Finally, this was one of the better catered conferences I've been to, so props for that :)
If everybody is happy because their data is being used to give them perfect products/services is it okay? ...Not if our data is being used to tell us what we want in the first place.
To explain ownership, [@gloriakt](http://twitter.com/gloriakt) suggests data use in divorce/legal proceedings.
To explain ownership, @gloriakt suggests data use in divorce/legal proceedings.
Amy wrote about indieweb, social web, privacy, websci15, ownmydata, & htp://twitter.com/gloriakt
Facebook asks 'what is your name'. If you think about it too long, you violate the terms of service. - [@emax](http://twitter.com/emax)
Facebook asks 'what is your name'. If you think about it too long, you violate the terms of service. - @emax
I finally moved Slog'd issues from my head+Workflowy+indiewebcamp wiki to actual [issues on bitbucket](https://bitbucket.org/rhiaro/slogd/issues?status=new&status=open)!
I finally moved Slog'd issues from my head+Workflowy+indiewebcamp wiki to actual issues on bitbucket!
Amy wrote about hacking, indieweb, slogd, & git
Amy wrote about websci15, & bubble tea
I guess I should stop complaining and do some work.Unless... complaining *is* work?
I guess I should stop complaining and do some work. Unless... complaining is work?
Amy wrote about phd, academia, & complaining
Hoooooly shit that was close. Got to the gate with seconds to spare thanks to the bus being an hour slow, a mental taxi driver who only spoke German but took me catching this flight personally (+40eur) and Ljubljana airport being teeny tiny.
Amy wrote about travel, flight, & airport
I like when papers say they conducted a study on "social networking sites" but actually it was just Facebook or Twitter (sometimes, MySpace).
Amy wrote about phd, social web, academia, profiles, & social networks
Listening to @paolo2day explain his research in Italian, enough English keywords and hand gestures that I know what's going on..
I made a list of things I hate: * Studies that assume people are clueless wrt their online identity and social data management * Studies that assume people are totally aware and make active conscious decisions about their online identity and social data management * Studies that generalise to all social networks from facebook or twitter * Studies that generalise to all people from one demographic * When that demographic is western college students * ..because that just means they couldn't make time/effort to step off campus * Studies that assume people have a straightforward or one-to-one mapping with their social profiles * Mining profile information to improve recommendations/advertising/marketing blah * Mining profile information to infer attributes * Studies that act like their results will still be meaningful in 6 months * Anything that reduces humans to dots and lines (all SNA lol) * Papers that assume there are technical solutions to all privacy issues * Studies that totally ignore imagined audience or expectation of privacy (it's public so we can use it!) I'm not saying I can necessarily do better, but I will at least refer back to this list and try...
I made a list of things I hate: Studies that assume people are clueless wrt their online identity and social data management Studies that assume people are totally aware and make active conscious decisions about their online identity and social data management Studies that generalise to all social networks from facebook or twitter Studies that generalise to all people from one demographic When that demographic is western college students ..because that just means they couldn't make time/effort to step off campus Studies that assume people have a straightforward or one-to-one mapping with their social profiles Mining profile information to improve recommendations/advertising/marketing blah Mining profile information to infer attributes Studies that act like their results will still be meaningful in 6 months Anything that reduces humans to dots and lines (all SNA lol) Papers that assume there are technical solutions to all privacy issues Studies that totally ignore imagined audience or expectation of privacy (it's public so we can use it!) I'm not saying I can necessarily do better, but I will at least refer back to this list and try...
Amy wrote about phd, academia, social networks, sna, studies, & complaining
"If Mark Zuckerberg had done GCSE Web Science, how would the web be different now?" How can Web We Want influence new creators/entrepreneurs/innovators on top of educating the users.
Amy wrote about websci15, web science, web we want, & digital rights
Mind blown by how quick, convenient and inexpensive it was just change a [megabus](http://twitter.com/megabus) reservation. Take note, train companies.
Mind blown by how quick, convenient and inexpensive it was just change a megabus reservation. Take note, train companies.
Need research into problems with personalisation. Filter bubbles, agency, nudges, manipulation, trust, security, informed consent, ... ~ Ansgar Koene
Amy wrote about phd, social web, privacy, social media, websci15, social network analysis, & personalisation
My new favourite way of feeling productive but not actually achieving anything is filing github issues for myself.
Amy wrote about life, github, & productivity
# Notes post social-informatics seminar talk methodology: iterative, inductive ResearchGate > Academia.edu Research in use of avatars Where the good enough boundary lies for managing? When is it dangerous, when serendipitous. What 'matters'? No perfect model of social management/access control. Easier to look at different systems doing the same thing in different ways (things of a similar species) Profiles shaped strongly by the needs of the service providers Problems of their own survival are also played out in this space Difficulties people may have managing profiles are sometimes down to easily fixable poor design things Interests of people fight with interests of service Github Definition of ownership ACNE and other diseases communities on twitter - people create second accounts to participate "epidemic communication patterns" - Robin Williams
Notes post social-informatics seminar talk methodology: iterative, inductive ResearchGate > Academia.edu Research in use of avatars Where the good enough boundary lies for managing? When is it dangerous, when serendipitous. What 'matters'? No perfect model of social management/access control. Easier to look at different systems doing the same thing in different ways (things of a similar species) Profiles shaped strongly by the needs of the service providers Problems of their own survival are also played out in this space Difficulties people may have managing profiles are sometimes down to easily fixable poor design things Interests of people fight with interests of service Github Definition of ownership ACNE and other diseases communities on twitter - people create second accounts to participate "epidemic communication patterns" - Robin Williams
Notes post social-informatics seminar talk
Number one reason for using pseudonyms & multiple accounts online: separation of audience - [@emax](http://twitter.com/emax)
Number one reason for using pseudonyms & multiple accounts online: separation of audience - @emax
OH: "The thing Semantic Web people are best at is jumping on bandwagons"
OH: "The thing Semantic Web people are best at is jumping on bandwagons
Amy wrote about semantic web, & academia
Okay, now I have a private github repo called 'life' with many issues.
Amy wrote about hacking, life, & github
Omg I have a lot of tabs open. When do I decide I can ignore all SN profiles studies conducted before 2012? Could also filter out 'myspace', 'digital natives' and 'college students'.
Amy wrote about phd, academia, research, social networks, & studies
Oops, I accidentally the whole morning.
Platforms 'over-ask' for data that users didn't think they should have to share - [@emax](http://twitter.com/emax)
Platforms 'over-ask' for data that users didn't think they should have to share - @emax
Prolific blogger motivations - ~"so parents know they're alive and don't have to call". That's why I tweet :)
Amy wrote about websci15, & blogging
Props to [Elfalafel](http://www.elfalafel.com/) for feeding a hungry student who didn't quite have enough cash :)
Props to Elfalafel for feeding a hungry student who didn't quite have enough cash :)
Amy wrote about food, edinburgh, falafel, & elfalafel
Rapidly coming to the conclusion that WebSci15 is going to be everything WWW2015 should have been. Clearly Web needs more social scientists.
Amy wrote about phd, social web, conference, academia, websci15, www2015, & web science
Social media theory is missing theories of power and control. Protocols and UIs are control mechanisms. ~ Hans Akkermans
Amy wrote about phd, social web, academia, social media, websci15, & social science
Starting to wonder why I haven't been organising my entire life via bitbucket/github issues. * New issue: Cut a spare house key. * New issue: Electricity bill is too high. * New issue: Fix lock on bathroom door. * New issue: Shower today, you smell. * New issue: Do laundry. * New issue: Buy hazelnuts. * New issue: Clean Tigo's carpet. * New issue: Catch up on emails from people met travelling. * New issue: Book travel to London and Lincoln in July. * New issue: Write thesis.
Starting to wonder why I haven't been organising my entire life via bitbucket/github issues. New issue: Cut a spare house key. New issue: Electricity bill is too high. New issue: Fix lock on bathroom door. New issue: Shower today, you smell. New issue: Do laundry. New issue: Buy hazelnuts. New issue: Clean Tigo's carpet. New issue: Catch up on emails from people met travelling. New issue: Book travel to London and Lincoln in July. New issue: Write thesis.
Amy wrote about hacking, life, & git
I tend to react to day-to-day things on a scale from nbd to idgaf. Other people seem way too melodramatic to me, but sometimes I wonder if I should care more about stuff. Eh. Whatever.
There are companies that help you sell your personal data to advertisers, I totally didn't realise this. Via [@RDBinns](http://twitter.com/RDBinns)
There are companies that help you sell your personal data to advertisers, I totally didn't realise this. Via @RDBinns
Amy wrote about phd, privacy, websci15, & personal data
Today's SocialWG telecon location: ![best office](https://rhiaro.co.uk/photos/1505portoroz/socialwgsea.jpg) And the SIP connection is better here than in my office, which seems like a perfectly reasonable justification for staying here always.
Today's SocialWG telecon location: And the SIP connection is better here than in my office, which seems like a perfectly reasonable justification for staying here always.
Amy wrote about travel, socialwg, beach, meeting, & sea
# Travel for productivity and health I'm flying back to the UK having been away for five weeks. I attended a meeting, a hackathon and two conferences, and in between climbed some mountains, hiked through some forests, swam in lakes and sea, spent an awful lot of time on trains and buses, visited some new countries and cities and met a ton of awesome people. Most people are incredulous when I say I'm actually working and not on a break from my PhD, and tell me how they'd never get away with this at their university or organisation. But it turns out, I've been way more productive over the last five weeks than I would have been if I had been in my office. I'm excused from obligations like meetings and seminars, I don't have to run errands or do chores, and as much as I love coffee breaks with my officemates six of them a day at half an hour each can be a bit of a time sink. There have been other distractions instead of course. Mountains that won't climb themselves. Chasing buses that never come. Hunting for a last minute bed to sleep in. These kinds of distractions keep me awake though, paying attention, instead of turning my brain to mush or making me feel resentful of everything around me. I'm primed for ideas and inspiration at all times. Turns out I work much better on the beach and in trains than I do in the same room every day. I've felt more awake and more able. My confidence is boosted every time I resolve some travel-related inconvenience or handle a difficult situation. I've been able to be spontaneous and felt empowered because of it. I'm stronger for living day by day out of a rucksack and not always knowing where I'm going. I've been able to focus on the moment and follow my instincts. It helps that I've been healthier, physically and mentally. I've been able to totally relax. The eczema on my hands cleared up completely and my nose has been more often functional than ever before. I've spent a lot of time outside, and been active. I've walked hundreds of miles, worn myself out completely and slept solidly. The flip side of this is I've pushed my feet and legs further than they're used to and they're starting to complain quite a lot. I've gained all kinds of new and weird injuries and rashes from insects, plants, rocks, sea creatures, my shoes, and miscellaneous things I've walked into. People. I've had days of intense socialising, and days of total solitude. I need the solitude. Between WWW in Florence and ESWC in Portoroz, I spent a week mostly alone. I realised how much good this had done me when I arrived in Portoroz, immediately sought people to have dinner with and was chirpy and social all evening. Throughout ESWC I've been keen to talk to people and didn't start feeling the need to hide until the very last afternoon. I've managed to see lots of friends I see rarely or only talk to online, which makes everything worth it by itself. I've had wonderful experiences with great people - travellers, hosts, friendly locals or conference-goers - who I'll probably never see again or keep in touch with. And I've made solid new friends I'm planning to keep hold of for the long term. I've had new experiences, and unexpected incredible opportunities have come my way. It's clearer what's important. I've been more myself. I hope I can keep this up when I'm back. But if not, I'm going to coin PhD-by-interrail. Incidentally, I've also spent less money than I would have at home (if I'd stopped paying my Edinburgh rent for this month; 60% couchsurfing, 40% hostel dorms is quite a bit cheaper).
I'm flying back to the UK having been away for five weeks. I attended a meeting, a hackathon and two conferences, and in between climbed some mountains, hiked through some forests, swam in lakes and sea, spent an awful lot of time on trains and buses, visited some new countries and cities and met a ton of awesome people. Most people are incredulous when I say I'm actually working and not on a break from my PhD, and tell me how they'd never get away with this at their university or organisation. But it turns out, I've been way more productive over the last five weeks than I would have been if I had been in my office. I'm excused from obligations like meetings and seminars, I don't have to run errands or do chores, and as much as I love coffee breaks with my officemates six of them a day at half an hour each can be a bit of a time sink. There have been other distractions instead of course. Mountains that won't climb themselves. Chasing buses that never come. Hunting for a last minute bed to sleep in. These kinds of distractions keep me awake though, paying attention, instead of turning my brain to mush or making me feel resentful of everything around me. I'm primed for ideas and inspiration at all times. Turns out I work much better on the beach and in trains than I do in the same room every day. I've felt more awake and more able. My confidence is boosted every time I resolve some travel-related inconvenience or handle a difficult situation. I've been able to be spontaneous and felt empowered because of it. I'm stronger for living day by day out of a rucksack and not always knowing where I'm going. I've been able to focus on the moment and follow my instincts. It helps that I've been healthier, physically and mentally. I've been able to totally relax. The eczema on my hands cleared up completely and my nose has been more often functional than ever before. I've spent a lot of time outside, and been active. I've walked hundreds of miles, worn myself out completely and slept solidly. The flip side of this is I've pushed my feet and legs further than they're used to and they're starting to complain quite a lot. I've gained all kinds of new and weird injuries and rashes from insects, plants, rocks, sea creatures, my shoes, and miscellaneous things I've walked into. People. I've had days of intense socialising, and days of total solitude. I need the solitude. Between WWW in Florence and ESWC in Portoroz, I spent a week mostly alone. I realised how much good this had done me when I arrived in Portoroz, immediately sought people to have dinner with and was chirpy and social all evening. Throughout ESWC I've been keen to talk to people and didn't start feeling the need to hide until the very last afternoon. I've managed to see lots of friends I see rarely or only talk to online, which makes everything worth it by itself. I've had wonderful experiences with great people - travellers, hosts, friendly locals or conference-goers - who I'll probably never see again or keep in touch with. And I've made solid new friends I'm planning to keep hold of for the long term. I've had new experiences, and unexpected incredible opportunities have come my way. It's clearer what's important. I've been more myself. I hope I can keep this up when I'm back. But if not, I'm going to coin PhD-by-interrail. Incidentally, I've also spent less money than I would have at home (if I'd stopped paying my Edinburgh rent for this month; 60% couchsurfing, 40% hostel dorms is quite a bit cheaper).
Uh oh, WebSci15 is shaping up to be way more interesting and fun than I expected, how will I write a paper during the conference now?!
Amy wrote about conference, websci15, & web science
I use FTP+IRC to share images almost exclusively these days. Do I win at social web?
Very colourful slide of reasons people lie online.. ![laserunicorn](https://rhiaro.co.uk/photos/1506websci/150630_emax.jpg)
Very colourful slide of reasons people lie online..
Amy wrote about phd, privacy, identity, websci15, emax, online personas, & lying
"on the web, *anything* can be a cat" - [Paolo](http://twitter.com/paolo2day) ![Meow.](https://rhiaro.co.uk/photos/1506websci/150629_paolocat.jpg)
"on the web, anything can be a cat" - Paolo
Amy wrote about websci15, http://twitter.com/paolo2day, & cat
So I went to Heriot Watt for the SWeL meeting today. I worked on the bus on the way there, and on the way back (apparently I've completely overcome the severe travel sickness I've had my whole life over the past few weeks). But back in my office for the afternoon, I've been at my desk, but hardly done anything. So now I'm going to the pub, and I expect to pick up where I left off, and finish what I was working on there. I guess tomorrow I might try the Forum roof. If that fails, maybe I'll try the Meadows, or the middle of Holyrood Park. I was starting to panic about the amount of UK travel/events I have coming up over the next couple of months, but looking at this it might actually improve my productivity.
Amy wrote about travel, phd, life, productivity, & office
We're asking questions about lying online to understand the tensions between users and platform creators/administrators ~ [@emax](http://twitter.com/emax)
We're asking questions about lying online to understand the tensions between users and platform creators/administrators ~ @emax
# What is a profile? *..this post is a work in progress.* Digital personhood is simultaneously becoming more fragmented and more centralised. People are giving more of themselves (consciously and unconsciously) to services which help manage communications and activities, and at the same time spreading themselves across multiple services in order to manage different aspects of themselves. (There's something to say about Goffman here). We perform roles in different social situations, to different audiences, in order to manage people's impressions of us and our place in the world. Interaction on social networks can involve a great deal of performance; there is potential for a high level of control over the version of oneself presented according to what data one makes available to the system, and what activities are explicitly published. However this control is diminished by increasing complexity and opactiy of systems, and users' limited understanding of how their data is propagated and presented to others. The more data given to third parties, the less control individuals have over their own presentation of self, even if (especially when?) the systems in question present the opposite impression (through privacy controls etc). Since people can't exist on the web directly (yet), a profile is a document which exists on the web on a person's behalf. But what goes into that document, and how it is addressed, created and distributed, varies between social network providers. Regardless of what the social network provider intends, how individuals choose to use the profile-related tools they are provided with also varies. Some systems impose rules, policies or technical barriers against certain things. People find ways to do 'certain things' anyway. The ways in which people subvert affordances of social systems - and why they do it - might give us some insight into how to improve social systems to better meet people's needs. Aside: Profiles also exist for products, places, organisations, etc... I'm not ignoring this, but not focussing on it for this post. ## A taxonomy of profiles To get started, we should observe existing profiles and compare them; try to find commonalities and differences, and eventually start to classify them. Even within networks, people use profiles differently of course, so I'll start by looking at the affordances of some systems with regards to profiles rather than individual instances of profiles for now. ### Existing taxonomies I didn't find much, but I might have not looked hard enough. A few 'taxonomies' of social networks are on marketing blogs, and are aimed at helping companies leverage their social media presence; high level descriptions of networks focussed around the content people post, mostly, and not hugely useful here. The [Classification Framework for Social Machines (Shadbolt et al, 2013)](http://sociam.org/www2013/papers/socm2013_submission_9.pdf) considers a broader scope than social networks and classifies systems fairly generally, but includes some useful constructs like roles of participants within a system, level of user autonomy and anonymity and motivations of participants to use a system. I was pleasantly surprised to find [Taxonomy for Social Network Data Types from the Viewpoint of Privacy and User Control (Richthammer et al, 2013)](http://epub.uni-regensburg.de/28276/1/ARES.pdf) is fairly recent and focussed specifically on social networks. They used a methodology called 'design oriented research' which I haven't looked into yet, but appears to include a magic step between comparing existing taxonomies and deriving their own terms. They classify existing social networks *after* the fact, to evaluate their taxonomy. That aside, great critique of a few existing frameworks that are not sufficient along various dimensions, and they fill in the gaps pretty well (in my humble opinion). This seems like something I can build on by going deeper into the profiles part of things. In particular: * Semantically specified and semantically unspecified data: the latter (like freeform bio text or posting a photo with no tags) impedes service providers from processing it automatically. * Mandatory and extended profile data, and to what extent mandatory data can be hidden from public view. Only Facebook and Google+ offer "selective disclosure of attribute values"; on Twitter and LinkedIn something is either public or private only to yourself. * Disclosed and disseminated data: data explicitly created by a user vs data created about them or in their space by someone else, including how much control a user has over visibility of data created in their space by someone else (like someone else posting on your Facebook wall). ### First pass I made a list of things I want to find out about how profiles work in different systems that I should be able to figure out from looking: * **What is displayed** on a profile? (Attributes, activities, other people's content, ...?) * How are profiles **updated**? * via the UI? * via the API * How are people **notified** of profile updates? * via the UI? * via the API * What granluarity of **access control** exists for parts of a profile? * How are different people's profiles **connected** together (within and between systems)? * How **portable** is a profile? (Can it be exported? Can it be imported to a different system?) * What **restrictions** are placed on the creation of profiles? And other things that might require a bit more digging or analysis: * How does a site appear to **model** a person and their relationship to profile documents and other activities or content objects in the system? * **What** is a profile for? (To what end was it created? What results from its existence?) * **Who** is a profile for? (You, others, a service, ...?) And a list of services/ways-of-representing-people-online, of varying degrees of specialisation, that I know reasonably well which would be good to compare: * FOAF * Indieweb/Microformats * Twitter * Tumblr * Pump.io * YouTube * CouchSurfing * Facebook * Quora * OkCupid * StackOverflow * LinkedIn * PeoplePerHour * Academia.edu * AirBnB * Friendica So I'll work my way through a few, refine the questions based on what I observe, and repeat. I'll see if this results in some kind of clustering or patterns that might bring us closer to an answer to 'what is a profile?'. ## Analysis Ongoing. TODO: screenshots. 1. What does a profile contain? **FOAF**: Attributes (fixed in FOAF but extensible with other vocabs), connections, links to authored content (maybe). **Indieweb**: Attributes (fixed as per microformats2 but extensible), authored content. **Twitter**: Attributes (fixed set), connections (subset), authored content, activities within the network (heavily curated). 2. How are profiles updated? **FOAF**: not spec'd (likely hand editing or through a client). **Indieweb**: not spec'd (likely editing static HTML). **Twitter**: Web form / client UI. 3. How are people notified of profile updates? **FOAF**: not spec'd **Indieweb**: not spec'd **Twitter**: None. 4. Access control? **FOAF**: not spec'd (WebID+TLS/WebAccessControl for protecting whole documents not individual attributes). **Indieweb**: not spec'd **Twitter**: All or nothing for content. A blocked user can still see some attributes (avatar, banner, name). Protected accounts show all profile data but not content or followers/ing 5. Connections? **FOAF**: `knows` - one way relationship, deliberately vague. **Indieweb**: Under debate, some people use XFN (eg. `rel=following`) **Twitter**: One directional; notifications sometimes sent to your followers when you follow someone, especially if others in your network also do; follows (some? all? curated how?) appear in your timeline; no notifications of unfollows; configurable notification when someone follows you. 6. Portability? **FOAF**: Server agnostic, move data as you please, but you need to control your domain. **Indieweb**: Server agnostic, move data as you please, but you need to control your domain. **Twitter**: You can download an archive of content and snapshot of profile attributes (and date of snapshot) but no changes history. 7. Restrictions? **FOAF**: n/a **Indieweb**: n/a **Twitter**: ~"may not create multiple accounts with overlapping use cases" 8. Model? TODO: *add diagrams* **FOAF**: [ PersonalProfileDocument] -- maker --> [ Person ] -- {attributes} --> "value". Usually inferred that a foaf file is a PersonalProfileDocument where the subject is the `maker`. Definite distinction between the person and the document about them. **Indieweb**: Use site URLs to refer to people. Attributes attached to `h-card`, embedded in homepage alongside other content. **Twitter**: account ~= profile ~= person 9. What is a profile for? **FOAF**: **Indieweb**: **Twitter**: 10. Who is a profile for? **FOAF**: **Indieweb**: **Twitter**: ## The many dimensions of lying online People lie in online profiles for all kinds of reasons: * to manage what people think of them. * to protect themselves. * to experiment. * to mitigate against mass surveillence. * because they don't understand why a system needs so much information about them in the first place. * [...and others](https://rhiaro.co.uk/pub?p=websci15) (van Kleek et al, 2015). People also break the rules: multiple accounts, fake names, etc. And people 'misuse' mandatory content fields to force a system into meeting their needs (eg. using YouTube video description boxes for profile links and attribution). These are all techniques for managing nuanced online self-representation. But people are fighting the systems to do this, not working with them. **We can learn from this.** ## Owning my profile data Of work I've seen to do with Personal Data Stores so far [citation needed] there's little taking into account of faceted identity or different audiences for versions of oneself. There's an assumption of a single, consistent version of a person and a set of facts to describe them. PDSs in 'serious' domains like healthcare tend to also require a link to a 'real world' person. This doesn't resemble how people currently manage their data on the social web, and nor is it strictly necessary for services to function. I'm gradually migrating my social web activities from the different services they're spread out over onto my own site. This is straightforward for generic things like twitter where I don't use a pseudonym or have any particularly tailored profile information or try in any way to curate my audience. It gets harder as I branch out into more specialised sites. How do I organise my content so people only see what they're interested in? (Presumably only my three friends on RunKeeper care about my runs so I don't need to subject everyone to them. Pretty sure *nobody* cares about recommendations on LinkedIn, but people insist on sending them so how best to pull them through to my site?). How do I organise my content so only the people I want to see certain things get to see it (I don't want to mix OkCupid and CouchSurfing)? Do I need new domains for my semi-anonymous (Quora) or anonymous (secret Tumblr anyone?) activities? What do I do with shared accounts (organisational Twitters, shared joke Tumblrs) especially where the content posted might be explicitly attributed to me. Some of the content in these profiles overlaps, as do some of the audiences. But there isn't a one-to-one mapping between most of them. My profiles are defined not only by the data about me they contain, but by others in the network, the social norms of the platform and related content. I haven't figured any of this out yet, and one of my big questions is how I can be sufficiently methodological about this to make the process useful for helping to answer 'what is a profile?'. I suspect I'm going to do a lot of accidental oversharing in the process. There is contention between controlling all of my data myself, and adequately managing my identity across social contexts. I want to own my data, so I need tools to resolve this. ## Understanding current practices of self-representation online for improved privacy and greater online freedom I hear "people don't want to manage their online personas themselves" a lot, but people are *already doing it* despite the inadequate tooling. If we can understand the nature of online profiles, and examine how people are getting by at present, we can make things easier for them (and ourselves, since we're all participating in this). Then we can spend less time fiddling with Facebook privacy settings and wondering if we accidentally shared that inappropriate picture with our boss - or endlessly reporting Twitter abuse - and more time linking ideas, expressing ourselves and using the web to its full potential.
..this post is a work in progress. Digital personhood is simultaneously becoming more fragmented and more centralised. People are giving more of themselves (consciously and unconsciously) to services which help manage communications and activities, and at the same time spreading themselves across multiple services in order to manage different aspects of themselves. (There's something to say about Goffman here). We perform roles in different social situations, to different audiences, in order to manage people's impressions of us and our place in the world. Interaction on social networks can involve a great deal of performance; there is potential for a high level of control over the version of oneself presented according to what data one makes available to the system, and what activities are explicitly published. However this control is diminished by increasing complexity and opactiy of systems, and users' limited understanding of how their data is propagated and presented to others. The more data given to third parties, the less control individuals have over their own presentation of self, even if (especially when?) the systems in question present the opposite impression (through privacy controls etc). Since people can't exist on the web directly (yet), a profile is a document which exists on the web on a person's behalf. But what goes into that document, and how it is addressed, created and distributed, varies between social network providers. Regardless of what the social network provider intends, how individuals choose to use the profile-related tools they are provided with also varies. Some systems impose rules, policies or technical barriers against certain things. People find ways to do 'certain things' anyway. The ways in which people subvert affordances of social systems - and why they do it - might give us some insight into how to improve social systems to better meet people's needs. Aside: Profiles also exist for products, places, organisations, etc... I'm not ignoring this, but not focussing on it for this post. A taxonomy of profiles To get started, we should observe existing profiles and compare them; try to find commonalities and differences, and eventually start to classify them. Even within networks, people use profiles differently of course, so I'll start by looking at the affordances of some systems with regards to profiles rather than individual instances of profiles for now. Existing taxonomies I didn't find much, but I might have not looked hard enough. A few 'taxonomies' of social networks are on marketing blogs, and are aimed at helping companies leverage their social media presence; high level descriptions of networks focussed around the content people post, mostly, and not hugely useful here. The Classification Framework for Social Machines (Shadbolt et al, 2013) considers a broader scope than social networks and classifies systems fairly generally, but includes some useful constructs like roles of participants within a system, level of user autonomy and anonymity and motivations of participants to use a system. I was pleasantly surprised to find Taxonomy for Social Network Data Types from the Viewpoint of Privacy and User Control (Richthammer et al, 2013) is fairly recent and focussed specifically on social networks. They used a methodology called 'design oriented research' which I haven't looked into yet, but appears to include a magic step between comparing existing taxonomies and deriving their own terms. They classify existing social networks after the fact, to evaluate their taxonomy. That aside, great critique of a few existing frameworks that are not sufficient along various dimensions, and they fill in the gaps pretty well (in my humble opinion). This seems like something I can build on by going deeper into the profiles part of things. In particular: Semantically specified and semantically unspecified data: the latter (like freeform bio text or posting a photo with no tags) impedes service providers from processing it automatically. Mandatory and extended profile data, and to what extent mandatory data can be hidden from public view. Only Facebook and Google+ offer "selective disclosure of attribute values"; on Twitter and LinkedIn something is either public or private only to yourself. Disclosed and disseminated data: data explicitly created by a user vs data created about them or in their space by someone else, including how much control a user has over visibility of data created in their space by someone else (like someone else posting on your Facebook wall). First pass I made a list of things I want to find out about how profiles work in different systems that I should be able to figure out from looking: What is displayed on a profile? (Attributes, activities, other people's content, ...?) How are profiles updated? via the UI? via the API How are people notified of profile updates? via the UI? via the API What granluarity of access control exists for parts of a profile? How are different people's profiles connected together (within and between systems)? How portable is a profile? (Can it be exported? Can it be imported to a different system?) What restrictions are placed on the creation of profiles? And other things that might require a bit more digging or analysis: How does a site appear to model a person and their relationship to profile documents and other activities or content objects in the system? What is a profile for? (To what end was it created? What results from its existence?) Who is a profile for? (You, others, a service, ...?) And a list of services/ways-of-representing-people-online, of varying degrees of specialisation, that I know reasonably well which would be good to compare: FOAF Indieweb/Microformats Twitter Tumblr Pump.io YouTube CouchSurfing Facebook Quora OkCupid StackOverflow LinkedIn PeoplePerHour Academia.edu AirBnB Friendica So I'll work my way through a few, refine the questions based on what I observe, and repeat. I'll see if this results in some kind of clustering or patterns that might bring us closer to an answer to 'what is a profile?'. Analysis Ongoing. TODO: screenshots. What does a profile contain? FOAF: Attributes (fixed in FOAF but extensible with other vocabs), connections, links to authored content (maybe). Indieweb: Attributes (fixed as per microformats2 but extensible), authored content. Twitter: Attributes (fixed set), connections (subset), authored content, activities within the network (heavily curated). How are profiles updated? FOAF: not spec'd (likely hand editing or through a client). Indieweb: not spec'd (likely editing static HTML). Twitter: Web form / client UI. How are people notified of profile updates? FOAF: not spec'd Indieweb: not spec'd Twitter: None. Access control? FOAF: not spec'd (WebID+TLS/WebAccessControl for protecting whole documents not individual attributes). Indieweb: not spec'd Twitter: All or nothing for content. A blocked user can still see some attributes (avatar, banner, name). Protected accounts show all profile data but not content or followers/ing Connections? FOAF: knows - one way relationship, deliberately vague. Indieweb: Under debate, some people use XFN (eg. rel=following) Twitter: One directional; notifications sometimes sent to your followers when you follow someone, especially if others in your network also do; follows (some? all? curated how?) appear in your timeline; no notifications of unfollows; configurable notification when someone follows you. Portability? FOAF: Server agnostic, move data as you please, but you need to control your domain. Indieweb: Server agnostic, move data as you please, but you need to control your domain. Twitter: You can download an archive of content and snapshot of profile attributes (and date of snapshot) but no changes history. Restrictions? FOAF: n/a Indieweb: n/a Twitter: ~"may not create multiple accounts with overlapping use cases" Model? TODO: add diagrams FOAF: [ PersonalProfileDocument] -- maker --> [ Person ] -- {attributes} --> "value". Usually inferred that a foaf file is a PersonalProfileDocument where the subject is the maker. Definite distinction between the person and the document about them. Indieweb: Use site URLs to refer to people. Attributes attached to h-card, embedded in homepage alongside other content. Twitter: account ~= profile ~= person What is a profile for? FOAF: Indieweb: Twitter: Who is a profile for? FOAF: Indieweb: Twitter: The many dimensions of lying online People lie in online profiles for all kinds of reasons: to manage what people think of them. to protect themselves. to experiment. to mitigate against mass surveillence. because they don't understand why a system needs so much information about them in the first place. ...and others (van Kleek et al, 2015). People also break the rules: multiple accounts, fake names, etc. And people 'misuse' mandatory content fields to force a system into meeting their needs (eg. using YouTube video description boxes for profile links and attribution). These are all techniques for managing nuanced online self-representation. But people are fighting the systems to do this, not working with them. We can learn from this. Owning my profile data Of work I've seen to do with Personal Data Stores so far [citation needed] there's little taking into account of faceted identity or different audiences for versions of oneself. There's an assumption of a single, consistent version of a person and a set of facts to describe them. PDSs in 'serious' domains like healthcare tend to also require a link to a 'real world' person. This doesn't resemble how people currently manage their data on the social web, and nor is it strictly necessary for services to function. I'm gradually migrating my social web activities from the different services they're spread out over onto my own site. This is straightforward for generic things like twitter where I don't use a pseudonym or have any particularly tailored profile information or try in any way to curate my audience. It gets harder as I branch out into more specialised sites. How do I organise my content so people only see what they're interested in? (Presumably only my three friends on RunKeeper care about my runs so I don't need to subject everyone to them. Pretty sure nobody cares about recommendations on LinkedIn, but people insist on sending them so how best to pull them through to my site?). How do I organise my content so only the people I want to see certain things get to see it (I don't want to mix OkCupid and CouchSurfing)? Do I need new domains for my semi-anonymous (Quora) or anonymous (secret Tumblr anyone?) activities? What do I do with shared accounts (organisational Twitters, shared joke Tumblrs) especially where the content posted might be explicitly attributed to me. Some of the content in these profiles overlaps, as do some of the audiences. But there isn't a one-to-one mapping between most of them. My profiles are defined not only by the data about me they contain, but by others in the network, the social norms of the platform and related content. I haven't figured any of this out yet, and one of my big questions is how I can be sufficiently methodological about this to make the process useful for helping to answer 'what is a profile?'. I suspect I'm going to do a lot of accidental oversharing in the process. There is contention between controlling all of my data myself, and adequately managing my identity across social contexts. I want to own my data, so I need tools to resolve this. Understanding current practices of self-representation online for improved privacy and greater online freedom I hear "people don't want to manage their online personas themselves" a lot, but people are already doing it despite the inadequate tooling. If we can understand the nature of online profiles, and examine how people are getting by at present, we can make things easier for them (and ourselves, since we're all participating in this). Then we can spend less time fiddling with Facebook privacy settings and wondering if we accidentally shared that inappropriate picture with our boss - or endlessly reporting Twitter abuse - and more time linking ideas, expressing ourselves and using the web to its full potential.
"What's the problem?" from non-techies (and some techies) in response to wanting to own my data, I get that a lot too..
Amy wrote about indieweb, social web, privacy, websci15, & ownmydata
When you re-discover someone you already follow in twitter and they're great and you wish you could follow them again.
Amy wrote about social media, & twitter
Wow, 90% drop in comments on politics articles after Huffpost switched to commenting via facebook ~ Rolf Fredheim, Alfred Moore and John Naughton
Amy wrote about social media, websci15, online personas, & anonymity
Wow, posters & demo session is way more lively than I've noticed at other conferences! Not overlapping it with something helps a lot I guess