How They Scored

This article on Streetsblog , a progressive pro-bicycle and transit website, is fascinating. The lengthy piece, worth reading in its entirety, explains how Streetsblog staff uncovered the identity of a hyperactive negative commenter with his own website, Commuter Outrage. Evidently the man behind Commuter Outrage, a twenty-something conservative who works in a civilian job at the Pentagon, was digging up material for his screeds during work hours using his employer's (and the government's) resources, and Streetsblog's questions about these practices quickly led the secretive fellow to disappear the entire Commuter Outrage website. Instructive were the easy-to-understand steps taken by Streetsblog staff to uncover the man's identity, along with evidence that suggested he was blogging on his employer's time. Also interesting was the fact that the attacks by Commuter Outrage and its putative staff (really just this one fellow, apparently) were not some right-wing consp...

Here's a nice discussion of authentication , an information technology concept I mention in "How They Scored," and its implications for online identity.

This story on wired.com , about the difficulty of losing your identity and taking up another, is something I wrote about in How They Scored. The characters are looking at the business possibilities of a proposed business named Dreedle, which would compile vast databases of consumer behavior; the narrator reflects on how such databases would make it difficult to disappear, as you used to be able to in the old days. There were plenty of things about me I didn't want rolled up into some online repository. One or two of these things I might confide to a lover -- that I liked to watch a certain kind of porn, for example (though I wasn't sure Meeghan was ready to know that). Another, less embarrassing detail I might write about on a blog -- my appreciation of the Giants infielders, say, or my enthusiasm for Russian composers. Other things I wouldn't mind mentioning in a phone call to my mother. But put them all together, combined with the records of everything I buy, books I rea...

I found this interview with author William Gibson , who like many science fiction writers is a futurist who uses fiction to explore his ideas rather than non-fiction, very pertinent. My favorite quote: Technologies don't emerge unless there's someone who thinks he can make a bundle by helping them emerge. One of the things I explore in How They Scored is exactly that dynamic: a software entrepreneur senses he can make a bundle -- to use Gibson's apt phrase -- on a certain idea he had about data mining and aggregation. During the book's action, he recruits both money and expertise from the other characters.