Who am I?

Identity. We keep coming back to identity don't we? AKMA, you created a monster with this topic.

I have had differences of opinion with two people who I used to be pretty close to within weblogging circles: Meryl Yourish and Mike Sanders. In fact, Meryl addresses me directly in a posting today. Still, however much I may disagree with both Mike and Meryl and their political beliefs and agendas, I respect that they expose their identity with their writing. I know who they are.

There are a few webloggers I know who write under pseudonyms because of work and other valid reasons. Regardless of this, in personal correspondence with me they use their real names. When they write to their weblogs, the communication is real.

Identity. Perhaps the issue isn't identity as much as it is respect. If we respect each other, we face each other with our true names, our true faces. At a minimum, we face each other with our true feelings and thoughts, opinions and dreams, our personal sense of sadness and beauty.

Who am I? What's my identity?

Look up and there's a blog title. Look down and there's a permalink for this posting. Over to the right of the permalink is a place for comments. The text changes based on the number of comments. To the right is a calendar and a list of previous weblog entries. To the left is a listing of hypertext-linked weblogs. This whole thing is packaged in a web page, hosted on a web server, and served through an interconnected series of wires and routers.

You know I've updated because the name of my weblog appears on weblogs.com. You know when I've updated because there's a date above and a timestamp below the posting. You also know that I use colors called bittersweet and aqua and white and sand in the design of this weblog and that my weblog logo is a picture of a bird over a stylized torch. Burningbird. You might smile a bit at this because you've always wondered what that squiggle was.

Somewhere on this page is a Movable Type graphic because I use Movable Type. This might make you happy because you also use Movable Type. Also somewhere on this page is a graphic linked to an RSS page. This might make you happy because you use an aggregator.

If you use Netccraft, you can see that I'm running Apache on FreeBSD, and that I support PHP, OpenSSL, FrontPage, and MySQL. If you look up the domain for burningbird.net using Verisign's whois, you can see that the domain is registered to me, Shelley Powers, and also includes a phone number and my address. Phone's being disconnected and I'm moving so this information is temporary. Too late for a phone call or to send flowers. Still you know at one time I lived in San Francisco. That's something.

This is a lot of information about my identity. Too bad it doesn't tell you who I really am.

However, if you take a moment and read a bit, the words slowly begin to revolve and move and flow about the page, and a picture begins to emerge and a story begins to unfold. Here is the story of Shelley Powers. It starts with the fact that she's a weblogger...

Posted by Bb at June 16, 2002 06:03 PM