Who can see which parts of my published surface area?: “
“To describe the various projections of ourselves into cyberspace, I use the following metaphor: we’re cells, and we’re growing the surface area of our cellular membranes. Every time I write a blog item, or post a Flickr photo, or tag a resource in del.icio.us, I enlarge the surface area of that membrane. I do it for two reasons. First, because I want influence to flow from me to the world. Second, because I want influence to flow the other way too. I’m soliciting feedback and interaction…”
Jon goes on to explain how, once your virtual surface area is enlarged to a certain point, you really *can’t* be aware of it all without some feedback – easy enough to achieve in your public realm, but regarding those parts of your membrane that are private (or visible to only some special set of individuals), including even those parts that you have forgotten about (that might come back to bite you later), getting the feedback you need can be a knotty problem indeed. I like your image of the personal cyber surface-area viewer, Jon, with the fine-grained control for drilling-down thru privilege-space… This reminds me (sans screw-knob, keyboard works well enough for me to navigate such trees) of the tag browser feature in WebnoteHappy -if you swap out the notion of semantic tags, and swap in for it the notion of privileged users/ groups (any number of which can be assigned to a content item, as with semantic tags).
(Via Jon Udell.)
