It became apparent recently, as I convalesce at home after a nasty case of cellulitis, that the Social Space Station is not ME. The Social Space Station is an online location for me to document things I find interesting about social networking, Web 2.0 (does anyone use this term anymore?), Twitter, microblogging etc. and engage with others who might also find something interesting about these themes.Â

This tumblelog has a terms of reference (broadly speaking) which means that when I find something interesting that's outside this scope, there is no outlet for it. Furthermore, the Social Space Station covers external interests rather than those about me or intimately connected to me.

Perhaps the Social Space Station is a weird third person thing or something?

Anyway, I have conflated the issue in the way I've been using the site, particularly in terms of stamping my various personal profiles from other sites (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, ...) all over the place and writing descriptions of myself.

It doesn't make sense.

In light of this, I am slowly migrating descriptive content (and avatars) that pertains to me to a new tumblelog at http://andrew-long.name which uses the new ".name" TLD. I think the ".name" TLD is important because it allows an individual to register themselves on a global scale as well as the existing local registration (e.g., births, deaths and marriages in New Zealand). In fact, I now use the URL http://andrew-long.name as a byline for talks and conference name tags.

This might sound crazy especially as there's hundreds of Andrew Longs out there and a limited number of meaningful domains to choose from. In fact, one of us grabbed http://andrewlong.name before I could (currently displays wedding photos). But I don't know, the Internet is a (in theory at least) borderless, global community of netizens where everyone is an IP address.Â

But what about open IDs? These could perform a similar function to ".name" TLD's I guess, however, these are maintained by 3rd party services and designed to minimise the number of usernames to remember. Not quite the same thing. Actually, I have an open ID through http://myopenid.com but would be more than happy to use my new personal domain in its place.

All this stuff requires deeper exploration than I can give at the moment (if I ever could?) so back to the migration and perhaps I'll see you at the new place too.