BlogSchmog | We live as if the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be.

The World Wide Web is just over a decade old. The majority of Internet users have only been online during the Bush Administration. Because of the speed of technology change and adoption, the ‘net tools are in a strange position of being both old and new, both established and innovative. What if the problems of spam and that ilk could be addressed through a radical redesign of our interfaces and underlying systems?

As a loyal Indiana fan, I’m not one to toot the horn of our in-state academic neighbors to the north often, but news of an important test of text messaging techology merits a little noise. Purdue University will conduct what is believed to be the first large-scale, real-world test of using text messaging to issue emergency alerts. The test, which will begin on Monday, Sept. 24, will involve more than 7,200 volunteers who will accept the test messages and respond so that researchers can track the actual time it takes to deliver messages to a mass audience.

I just answered a call for papers for Migrations and Identities Journal of People and Ideas in Motion, a new bi-annual publication slated to debut next summer. The proliferation of social networks and sites requiring new accounts makes it a common phenomenon to have to manage dozens of username-password profiles across many communities of different personal value. Much of this redundancy of action begins well before students leave home for college. My interest is in understanding the benefits to propagating and iterating one’s identity when migrating from one context to the next, and also in the barriers that present themselves to new members of an online community.