Who am I? Am I my Blog?

In this post I speculate about the implications of having a social graph outside of specific social networks, creating your digital self, and setting up your blog as an OpenID.

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Index

1. Friend of a Friend
2. Personal URI
3. OpenID
4. It All Comes Together in the Blog
5. Buddhist Reflections

Recently I have added some interesting features which led me to some reflexions that I want to share in this post. Up until now, all of my posts have been purely technical, so for a change this will be a more speculative post although it will have some technical elements.

Friend of a Friend

For some time now, I have been following two trends related to our online identities. The first is FOAF--an initiative to define our social graph in generic manner so that it is not social network-specific. I do participate in "proprietary" social-networks such as Facebook, Orkut, Hi5, Plaxo, etc. but wouldn't it be great that you could describe yourself and your relationship to friends in a manner that is not locked down to any specific application? Well, FOAF allows you to do just that! Following the FOAF specification, which is a machine readable RDF document, you describe yourself and your relations for the world to see. I guess world here simply means FOAF-enabled applications. I have already created my FOAF page using the FOAF-a-matic developed by Leigh Dodds. Probably I will combine this later Matthew Rowe's Facebook Foaf Generator but I haven't done so yet. So next time you add me as a friend in a social network, consider also creating your own FOAF page and adding me as a friend there too!

Personal URI

In order to add me to your FOAF page you need to "point" to me first! No problem... Following Tim Berners Lee's advice, I created and URI (http://www.gaugeus.com/ramblings/assets/foaf.rdf#AMP) for myself. Why have a URI identifying me as object on the web? Well, according to Berner Lee, one of the defining features of this digital era we are at, now interchangeably refered to as Semantic Web or Social Graph, what is important is no longer the documents in websites but the objects to which those documents belong. In order for objects to be represented, they need a unique, universal identifier, and that's the URI and my URI now represents my presence on the web. So if you ask, "Who is Andres?" the answer is will be "He is http://www.gaugeus.com/ramblings/assets/foaf.rdf#AMP". So if you want to "point to me" from now on, point to my URI!

OpenID

Now that I defined who (my URI) I am what is my relation to the world (FOAF page), I want to define how I interact with the world. I have joined the OpenID club to gain restricted access to my accounts through a single universal user account. No more memorizing hundreds of differnt accounts and passwords! Ok, it only works with OpenID enabled sites and not with ALL sites requiring log-in, but its a start. First I realized that I already had OpenIDs without knowing. Then I thought, that if a URL was going to represent me, might as well be MY URL, so I hosted and OpenID provider for myself using phpMyID.

It All Comes Together in the Blog

Having my OpenID hosted in my own server wasn't enough. I followed Sam Ruby's advice on how to turn my actual blog into an OpenID! All I had to do is include in the header of the homepage for my blog a reference to a yadis file which the yadis file points to my OpenID providers. So now when I need to log into a website supporting OpenID, I simply use www.gaugeus.com/ramblings and they validate my identity. But, who am I again? It's right there too! Following Aaron Swartz suggestion, I also  included in the header of the homepage for my blog a reference to my FOAF description. So now www.gaugeus.com/ramblings is not just my means of expression, but my means of interaction and very identity in the online world. This is definitely very tidy and practical, but I still haven't decided if it is cool or creepy!

Buddhist Reflections

The Buddhist tradition describes a person as made of parts, since one can be mentally broken or divided into the five psychophysical aggregates: forms, feelings, discriminations, compositional factors, and consciousness. The first is the body, and the later four are the mind and its accompanying mental factors. These aggregates are chosen because usually it is with one or a combination of these that we identify ourselves, or said in technical terms they constitute the basis of designation of a person. Sometimes I feel that I am my body (identifying with the aggregate of the body when looking in the mirror thinking that I am looking at myself). Other times I feel that my mind is me (identifying with the aggregate of consciousness). And in some situations I may feel that I am my personality (identifying with the aggregate of compositional factors).

Within the branch of Buddhist epistemology, there is a lot of speculation about how the person relates to the aggregates. Do the aggregates depend on the person? Does the person depend on the aggregates? If I search for the person within the aggregates can I find it? If I search for the person outside of the aggregates, can I find it?

When so much of my life is spent online and so many of my social interactions take place digitally, we begin to identify also with elements of the web. Do you want to know who I am? Look me up in Facebook. I am in Facebook (not just my name, my e-mail or my picture. I am in Facebook), etc. For modern Buddhists the aggregate of the form now includes social network profiles, e-mails, blogs, etc.  Before, this was less palpable because those elements where scattered throughout an amorphous network of servers, but now that it is possible to centralize the defining characters of a our digital personae (who we are, what our relation to the external world is, and how we interact with it) into a single digital entity, our semantic web identity feels so much more tangibly as our new basis of designation. Even weirder, if I search for the person among the basis of designation I can find it and point to it. Remember, who is Andres? Andres is http://www.gaugeus.com/ramblings/assets/foaf.rdf#AMP.

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