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Slide 1: The Widgetized Self Distributed identity and the role of the engines Anne Helmond

Slide 2: Who Am I?

Slide 3: I Am Distributed

Slide 4: Distributed identity

Slide 5: Constructing identity online: The homepage [...] home page authors engage in bricolage, adopting and adapting borrowed material from the public domain of the Web in the process of fashioning personal and public identities. In such sites, what are visibly ‘under construction’ are not only the pages but the authors themselves. - Chandler(1998)

Slide 6: Identity under construction

Slide 7: The personal homepage • Fairly static and closed self-referential environment • Content stored in one place • Based on the unit of the page • Required HTML knowledge

Slide 8: Constructing identity online: The blog [...] blogs as sites for identity construction and self-invention and have underlined the unruly multiplicity of the social identity online (Paasonen 2002: 22).

Slide 9: The blog • The blog is a database • The blog is not a closed environment • Based on the unit of the post • Focus on freshness and links • Does not require HTML knowlegde (unless...)

Slide 10: Presentation of the self

Slide 11: A default identity

Slide 12: A database identity If one considers the blog as a personal database, then as everyone knows databases are most efficiently queried via a command line. (McFarland, 2007)

Slide 13: The blog as a personal database

Slide 14: A widgetized identity • The blog as centralizing force of the distributed identity • “Start page on steroids”

Slide 15: Drag and drop identity Constant tweaking of identity through widgets

Slide 17: Enter the engines • Third party databases • Dispersion and aggregation • Software-engine relations • The blogger is subject to a software-engine regime • Creating a search engine friendly identity

Slide 18: Focussing on the self Well anyway, thanks for reading. I've got to go check Site Meter again and see if I'm still 479,027 on Technorati. I did mention my new Technorati obsession, right? (Mush, 2006)

Slide 19: Software-engine relations • Statistics: vanity or the influence of engines? • To what extent do we blog for the engines?

Slide 20: Google knows I blog for Google (and Google knows who I am)

Slide 21: Thank you. Questions? contact: anne@annehelmond.nl