My blog has dedicated pages that list my articles and presentations. I periodically blog about resources for others. The only thing I don’t have on there is a CV. That’s mainly due to the fact that I believe in tailoring such things for any given context. Maybe some blogs have a hybrid quality (i.e. elements of the personal website and blog) to them?

Looking at my own profile, I see a variety of personal Web pages, each reflecting an aspect of my life:

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/swalter/www/index.html
http://slisweb.sjsu.edu/people/faculty/walters/walters.php
http://www.h-net.org/people/editors/show.cgi?ID=123824

Then, there is my Facebook profile (a type of page that Steven didn’t include in his survey). Mine’s at:

http://uillinois.facebook.com/profile.php?id=16821593

And, of course, the blog, which, in my case, is far more local in concern than the more ambitious projects of my colleagues:

http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/services/

Certainly, blogging is not the only way to meet the goals that personal Web pages once served in terms of presenting one’s ideas, and not even big-time bloggers like Michael Stephens have completely eschewed the traditional model of dissemination of ideas in print, but the landscape is far more complex than it was when I put my first library Web site together (on resources for the study of American education) in 1998!

Thanks for helping me to think about it!

Informal discussions in my library on how we present ourselves in a 2.0 world have caused me to reflect on balance, professionalism, individual responsibility for presenting the voice of the organization, and displaying whole selves to our community of users. I was uneasy to hear a colleague say that since we were now talking about Facebook (for example) as an intentional place for our organization to be, this person was changing the photo, info, etc. so it would more fit the library job title image. This meant reshaping the represented identity to lessen or eliminate aspects of what he does as a community volunteer and believes in the wider community. This is not the direction I’d like to see librarians go, so how deeply ingrained is the idea of separation of identities? I loved your closing line — “It almost seems now we are what we’re interested in and talking about – not who we declare ourselves to be – and that’s what shows in our social networks.”

I did once have a personal site (1998-2005) …. http://web.archive.org/web/20050405204255/alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~janicke/lisa.htm … but the server was retired and I – like many others I suspect – didn’t so much make a decision not to have a personal site but rather regularly run out of time in my weeks to do everything that might be good to do. It’s on the list. But, the list is long.

Barbara raises an interesting point I didn’t considere. Is the personal web site too 1.0 for today’s web world. Admittedly my web site is strictly a read-only site – there’s no write-to-it option. But is that a turn off for folks? I still think there’s a good deal of value at the Keeping Up web site – even if you can’t add to it – but there sure is a lot you can take away from it. But just the same the old-style web site just doesn’t allow for much peer production.

I think this is fairly characteristic of Web 1.0 rhetoric – self-representation that is relatively formal, controlled, and intended to provide a limited amount of basic information framed for a particular audience. My Heckle and Jyde identities, oddly enough, mingle more comfortably at Facebook and in my personal blog where I don’t try to separate them – whether that’s because I’ve changed or technology has, I’m not sure.

I suspect there’s a new and complex rhetoric developing for the self-fashioning involved in Web 2.0 technology that is significantly different than the kind of identity projected when a web page was the primary means of telling the world who you were. It almost seems now we are what we’re interested in and talking about – not who we declare ourselves to be – and that’s what shows in our social networks.