Blogging, etc.

I first set up a blog here in 2003. As far as I recall that was before social networking really took off, and while Web 2.0 (as the public understands it, anyway) was in its early days. Back then a blog seemed like an easier way of maintaining the personal homepage I had hosted at ehayes.co.uk. (The fact I posted 20-odd items in 5 years maybe suggests otherwise.) Now that URL just points to my Facebook profile. And my Facebook profile links in to my Flickr page (which itself contains many of the photos originally hosted at ehayes.co.uk). It's all rather circular.

I started thinking about this after looking at Qdos, which purports to "score" an individual's "digital identity", according to "popularity", "impact", "activity" and "individuality", calculated (as far as I can tell) against use of various popular Web 2.0 resources.

Whether or not Qdos itself has any value is a side issue (for what it's worth, at the moment it looks a lot like an ego-trip for those who already know they spend a lot of time online). It is the fact Qdos aggregates an individual's identities on Facbook, Flickr, Ebay, YouTube, Digg etc. that is interesting. It creates the impression that to be anywhere (or anybody) online, you have to be everywhere; that your online worth is directly proportional to the number of content aggregating and social networking sites you use.

If that is the case then there must be a risk that the non-geek internet user is alienated. Instead of social networks liberating an individual by giving him online visibility, they limit him by giving him only a slither of a presence. He runs the risk of being invisible online to too much of his human network. That must be a major challenge to social networks in 2008. If an individual needs (or wants) multiple identities, how can he best combine them so he still has a meaningful single persona? If social networks are too proprietorial about the identities they contain do they risk a backlash from those who expect to be able to control their "digital identity" (as Qdos would put it) better?