The document discusses how identity is constructed online through various platforms. It compares personal homepages and blogs as ways individuals fashion public identities on the web. Personal homepages in the late 1990s presented fairly static, self-contained identities through individually authored HTML pages. In contrast, blogs allow for more fluid, distributed identities through constantly updated content stored across a database, not confined to a single page. Blogs support a more unruly, multifaceted online social identity than early personal homepages.

1. The Widgetized Self
Distributed identity and the role of the engines
Anne Helmond

2. Who Am I?

3. I Am Distributed

4. Distributed identity

5. Constructing identity
online: The homepage
[...] home page authors engage in bricolage, adopting
and adapting borrowed material from the public
domain of the Web in the process of fashioning
personal and public identities. In such sites, what are
visibly ‘under construction’ are not only the pages
but the authors themselves. - Chandler(1998)

6. Identity under
construction

7. The personal
homepage
• Fairly static and closed self-referential
environment
• Content stored in one place
• Based on the unit of the page
• Required HTML knowledge