Dan Patterson

Last week I completed the acquisition of the domain name danpatterson [dot] com and transition this site, my primary website, to the URL http://www.danpatterson.com.

Technical Notes

• Links: If you're one of the good people who have linked to me or my websites in the past (thanks!), permit me to make a small request in asking you to point a new link to www.danpatterson.com.  All of the other links (http://dan-patterson.com, http://danpatterson.me, http://creepysleepy.com, etc) will continue to work, but www.danpatterson.com is now and will remain my primary domain.
• Email: The primary (and public) email contact on this site is now dhp@danpatterson.com.  Add this address to your contact list.  However, all of my email addresses will remain the same, so if we've communicated in the past all previous addresses will remain unchanged.  My contact page is here.

Thoughts on Digital Identity

Acquiring my name, Dan Patterson, tied to the primary TLD (top level domain - the .com in a URL string) has been important to me since I started using the internet.  I began podcasting in 2004 and blogging in 2005.   Believe it or not, I was (and in many ways remain) a reluctant blogger.  The internet is a web (pun intended) of dubious information and sources.  

However, the internet has become the de facto platform for information consumption and dissemination for much of the industrialized world.  Though institutions like libraries, government, and enterprise are also crucial pieces of Western information infrastructure, the web is where most people go to acquire information.  Inherently tied to information access is the ability for individuals to vet and verify information.  In a word, this process is called Trust.  For an individual, organization, government, or business to take action or make a decision based on information, that information must be Trusted and verifiable.  Tying a source, in this case an identity by way of a name, to information of any kind is critically important of all individuals.  This is why obtaining my name to a common domain is important to me.  It should be important to you as well, regardless of your particular station in society at large or online.  

Thanks

The process of acquiring this domain took a long time and I owe my thanks to a few people.  First, the domain was paid for by a benefactor who wises to remain nameless (as always, I provide a list of professional disclosures here), and was given to me as a personal Christmas gift  (as opposed to a professional gift which I could not accept due to journalistic and ethical conflicts).  I used a domain broker, Loren Stocker, who was great to work with and I would recommend to anyone looking to acquire a hard-to-get domain.  I was connected to Loren through Dane Atkinson, CEO of Squarespace.  Dane is a another great guy who I recommend highly.

And last, but of course not least, thanks much to you. 

I appreciate your interest, links, comments, and thoughtful insights over the past 5 years.  Here's to many more.

Thank you.

Most Sincerely Yours,

- Dan Patterson

January, 2010

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