Today was my first day attending ICWSM 2008. It was a really refreshing change of environment for me, where I could on learn for the sake of learning without wondering if I was being productive.

Needless to say, I was psyched about Brad Fitzgerald’s keynote where he waxed philosophy on opening up the social graph with technologies such as OpenID, OAuth, XFN, etc. Yes! Both educational *and* job relevant. However, Brad didn’t address the topics which I would’ve liked to see; specifically with respect to persona management. Even in the Q&A he glossed over this topic… While acknowledging that “persona bleeding and management is a problem” he didn’t offer any ideas on how we should begin to solve this problem beyond “It’s up to you to manage your persona”.

Seriously? People can barely micromanage data for a single persona; can we really expect the average user to understand the implications of having multiple personas, and then manage them effectively? Or is it the case that the average user doesn’t want multiple personas? I don’t actually believe this latter statement is true. If anything, people are used to the current state of affairs, where each website is implicitly a separate persona.

During our lunchtime conversation, Kathy Gill took issue with the use of the word “persona” to describe different online identities, or different facets of your personality since it implies that the personality you are displaying is assumed, or fake. I still like it since I seem to lack any normal association with the word. But there is something here. I really think that we lack the appropriate jargon to talk about this particular problem. I’ve read a bunch about data portability and Identity 2.0, but I haven’t seen the problem of persona management being addressed much. Do we even know the multitude of ways people are separating their online identities? I had a tiny example a while back, but I’m sure there are many more use cases out there. How do we design protocols such that we can support persona management in a distributed and scalable way, but still make it easy to use and hard for users to do the wrong thing?

The other thing I wanted Brad to cover was why it would make sense for the internet heavy hitters to pick up something like OpenID (as a consumer, not just a provider). As a consumer and a geek, I love the idea of opening up the social graph. But large companies need to be driven by more factors than “it’s the cool thing to do”.

Anyway, there were a score of really interesting talks today, but I’m not sure when I’ll get around to blogging about them. I will say that one of my favorites was this paper on “impression agreement” based on online profiles — i.e. what parts of my profile will result in you perceiving me in the same way I perceive myself? Cool stuff, congratulations on the best paper nomination!

I’ve got two words for you: freakin’ awesome.

This past week I hosted a brown dinner where the theme was “wrapped”. For the uninitiated, “brown dinner” is our weekly themed potluck dinner. Its moniker comes from the 5 originators of the dinner who were all Brown alumni.

I decided to make Chinese Zong Zi which are glutinous rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves and then steamed/boiled. The results were pretty good. I made two kinds, a savory zong zi with mushrooms, pork, peanuts, and Chinese sausage, and a sweet version with red bean paste. The results were surprisingly good for my first try!

Wrapping the dumplings was a huge pain when I first started. In the first hour I only wrapped two (and lost a few bamboo leaves in the process). After I got more familiar with the wrapping, I powered through all 20 dumplings with relative ease.

We’ve been doing the brown dinners for quite some time now, but nobody’s really documented the food at all. The “wrapped” theme lent itself to some very pretty and delicious offerings, which I’ve decided to post here.