Michael Zimmer.org

I am pleased to announce that selected papers from the “Identity and Identification in a Networked World” graduate student symposium held at New York University in September have been published in a special issue of First Monday. Here are titles and abstracts:
Identity and Identification in a Networked World
by Tim Schneider and Michael Zimmer
Summary of events and acknowledgments.
Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites
by danah boyd
“Are you my friend? Yes or no?” This question, while fundamentally odd, is a key component of social network …

Blogging has been light lately as I have been quite busy in “real life”:

I’m pleased to announce that the “Identity and Identification in a Networked World” graduate student symposium was a smashing success this past weekend. Well over 100 people attended, and the diversity of opinions and approaches for understanding issues of identity, identifiability and identification in our digital world was incredibly stimulating. We’re already talking about doing it again next year, and some wondered aloud whether we’re on our way to developing a new field of “digital identity studies”…
I’ve …

As concerns about the privacy of one’s search engine history steadily increase, various solutions have been offered to help avoid the wholesale surveillance and aggregation of one’s search queries. While most solutions rely on attempts to cloak one’s IP address, a new solution instead relies on obfuscation: TrackMeNot.
Developed by Daniel Howe and Helen Nissenbaum, TrackMeNot (TMN) is a Firefox extension (download here) that protects against search data profiling by issuing randomized queries to popular search-engines with fake data:
TrackMeNot runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that periodically issues …

Registration is now open for the “Identity and Identification in a Networked World” multidisciplinary graduate student symposium, September 29-30, 2006 at the NYU School of Law. Twenty graduate students from across North America and Europe will share their exciting research on the social, cultural, philosophical, legal and technical perspectives of systems of identity, identifiability and identification. In addition to graduate student panels, a keynote talk will be delivered by Professor Ian Kerr, Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law & Technology at the University of Ottawa.
The symposium is free and open …

[I am one of the organizers the following graduate student symposium to be held this fall at NYU]
CALL FOR PAPERS
Identity and Identification in a Networked World:
A Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Symposium
When: September 29-30, 2006
Where: New York University
Submission deadline: July 5, 2006
Increasingly, who we are is represented by key bits of information scattered throughout the data-intensive, networked world. Online and off, these core identifiers mediate our sense of self, social interactions, movements through space, and access to …