danah boyd

Danah Michele Boyd (also known as danah boyd) is an academic researcher and blogger, best known for media appearances where she has been speaking as an authority about social networking sites such as Friendster and MySpace. She has been profiled in The New York Times, and interviewed on NPR. In 2006, she appeared on The O'Reilly Factor as a cultural anthropologist.

Biography

Born c. 1978 as Danah Michele Mattas, Boyd grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Boyd initially studied computer science at Brown University where she worked with Andy van Dam, before transferring to MIT to pursue a Masters Degree in sociable media with Judith Donath at the MIT Media Lab. Afterwards, she took a year off from school and traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she became associated with the individuals who were developing Friendster and other social-networking sites. She documented what she was observing via her blog, and this grew into a career as she became a recognized authority on the subject.

Boyd presently resides in San Francisco, California, where she works at Yahoo! Research Berkeley, and is a Ph.D. student with Peter Lyman in the UC Berkeley School of Information.

Writing

Boyd has written over a dozen academic papers and op-ed pieces on various facets of online culture, and has presented papers or been a speaker on the subject at major conferences such as SIGGRAPH, CHI, and the AAAS annual meeting.

Selected articles include:

• Salon.com, July 28, 2004, "The new blogocracy" (op-ed)
• Salon.com, January 8, 2005. "Turmoil in blogland" (op-ed)
• Boyd also wrote the "Autistic Social Software" chapter in Joel Spolsky's book Best Software Writing I, pp 23-47, 2005,
• "Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networks", April 2004 (pdf)
• "Profiles as Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster", January 2006. (pdf)

References

• Boyd's personal website, (List of press)
• Connected Selves - Boyd's blog
• New York Times, November 23, 2003 "Decoding the New Cues in Online Society" - a major profile of Boyd
• San Francisco Chronicle, April 25, 2004, "The Profiler; Why the online masses act the way they do"
• NPR, August 12, 2005, "Googled! Will the Internet Come Back to Haunt You?"
• NPR, February 1, 2006, "Teens Create their Own Space Online"
• Fox News, February 24, 2006, "Scientists: Internet, Chat Rooms Good for Teenagers"
• The O'Reilly Factor, March 30, 2006 - Boyd appeared as an expert "cultural anthropologist"

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