Recently in Technology in General Category

At the Web Conference tutorials, Mark Greenfield brought up an interesting question for discussion in "The Long Tail of Social Networks": How much of your identity do you reveal online?

Answers varied from not revealing true names, not posting any pictures, to making sure that all handles were the same, posting pictures via Flickr and sharing, and using one's digital identity as a portfolio and resume.

Here are some thoughts to consider about your digital identity:

• For younger workers especially, your digital identity (blogs, wikipedia edits, contributions to user communities, your domain name, etc.) may be a way to compensate for experience on a resume.

• Whenever I meet someone new, the techie-stalker in me is tempted to Google search.  How many potential employers, members of search committees, and customers (internal or external) are doing the same?  Do you know what comes up when your name is Googled? When was the last time you checked?  Maybe you're not in the market for a new job, but your reputation is still important to you, so check out Penelope Trunk's Five Ways to Build Buzz Around Yourself.

• What do you stand to lose by not staking claim to your identity? Will someone claim it out from under you?  Mark Greenfield's mentioned that he is now markgr.com because someone made off with markgreenfield.com.  On Jumping Monkeys podcast episode #47, Jennifer Granick of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Brad Stone of the New York Times talked about their differences of opinion as parents on whether or not to secure their children's domain names until they reach adulthood. Look at all the Twitter doppelgangers out there that force the originals to use handles like "TheRealDvorak". (And I won't mention the two Penn Stater who I know who have received this highest form of Twitter flattery.)

Consider the possibility that digital contributions may not just become a normal part of someone's portfolio, but be expected. Begin thinking about your digital identity.  Take charge of what Google says about you.  Tend to it like you tend to your resume.  And finally, don't wake up to find your digital identity already claimed:

And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife! —Talking Heads

Some people prefer to multitask.  Some prefer to unitask. Some, who multitask should unitask, and vice versa.  Our technology today is really set up with the multitasker in mind; our meetings set up for the unitasker.

Who am I?  I'm the multitasker. On caffeine. Who doesn't sleep.

I am always wary of injecting politics into my nonpolitical writing because something about hearing a differing opinion makes people shut down entirely, discounting all of your ideas.  However, the disastrous infusion of politics + family gathering has monopolized my thoughts so much this weekend that I feel compelled to share my reflections, at my on risk, of course.

Christopher Long recently posted on the voting tendencies of the younger generation in the recent primary and linked to an interesting article that offered a possible explanation for the demographics.  Based on my own experiences this weekend, I'd like to offer some of my own observations.

I mentioned before that I'm not a Gen Y and I'm at the tail end of Gen X.  Just as Jim Leous noted that younger voters not having a land line has had an influence on polling numbers, other trends in communications and technology are affecting the election.

While I'm not quite in the text-messaging, land-line category of people, there is one technology and media use pattern that applies to me that makes all the difference between me and my relatives: I don't have cable.  I don't get the paper.

I recently posted on my parenting blog, Caution! May Contain Small Parts, on what I called Technological White Space.

The idea is that, like content on a page, technology is best used (and not used) strategically to give users a more focused experience.

Technological White Space would be the areas where we strategically eliminate or coordinate the use of technology to prevent that feeling of technological overload even the most tech savvy get, which is akin to reading a dense, content-heavy Web page.

To add some much-needed white space, we could:

• find the best tech tool for the job and use it consistently.
• don't use a tools for the sake of using them; it's like filling a Web page with meaningless filler items.
  
• coordinate our uses of technology across departments and throughout the university, rather than choosing to reinvent the wheel by using our own separate tools that overwhelm users.
• reduce the instances of a particular technology if you want to force separate users of those instances to collaborate/coordinate.