danah boyd on Social Networks

From Cory Doctorow: "danah boyd... gives an awesome, in depth talk on social networks and why people are using them. She touches on the history of social networks, how the online communities came into being, and some of the forces working on them today. There's no better speaker on social networks than danah boyd -- prepare to have your mind blown." /Boing Boing/

"A SOCIOLOGIST among geeks and a geek among sociologists, danah boyd has 278 friends who link her to 1.1 million others... A 25-year-old graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley (h)er irrepressible observations have made her a social-network guru for the programmers and venture capitalists who swarm around Friendster and its competitors.

"'She's definitely a Pied Piper for a bunch of different people,'' said Joichi Ito, a high-tech venture capitalist who lives in Tokyo. ''At the same time she, as an academic, is able to articulate what is going on in a way that the people building the tools rarely understand or can articulate.'

"Her academic supervisors are envious of her advantage. ''I look at cyberspace the way a deep-sea diver looks at the sea: through a glass plate,'' said Ms. Boyd's academic adviser, Peter Lyman, a professor at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems. ''She is out there swimming in it.''/New York Times/