My Identity Crisis

A fairly cautious individual, I tend to reveal little until I am reassured that I am safe. Also, of an age where there is already oh-so-much to remember, I know I am likely to lose a list of passwords, yet don't want to leave my identity hanging out, so to speak. So I try variations, and forget the variations. I rebel against locking up my private identifiers, so that I would have to resentfully unlock them to find out what they are. One of my financial institutions instituted such a complex logon with so many PERSONAL bits of information required that in anger I answered questions cryptically, and then forgot what my answers were. As a result, no matter how many times I reset my passwords, I am unable to access my account.

I wonder at people who so compliantly provide usernames and passwords to all kinds of websites.

And yet here I am intriqued by sites like Del.icio.us and Technorati, that I think I might want to actually use, and frustrated at the registration process. I don't know you, I want to say, why should I give you my name? If I just made a list of sites, I could have it on a piece of paper where I could find it, and you couldn't, unless I decided I wanted to share it with you. Maybe it's a holdover from academia, but how do I know what you'll do with my research?

And do we really think we can have enough passwords that we can keep people out, and at the same time have so much of ourselves so accessible by anyone?

Too philosophical, I have to do my homework now:

When I actually had a task, Del.icio.us suddenly made sense. It's fairly easy to use, and to access. I initially created an account that was anonymous, so I could walk away from it, and then when I decided I really wanted to use it, made it less so. As always, I don't have enough time to really get to know it.

As far as Technorati goes, whenever I try to explore it in a meaningful way, I get lost reading the blogs. And I forget what the assignment was anyway.