boyd, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Information, explores how young people negotiate the presentation of self in online mediated contexts. Her research focuses on how this young audience engages with "digital publics" - connected social spaces such as MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube.

Currently, boyd is a Graduate Fellow at the USC Anneberg Center, and social media researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. Her recent work has explored diverse topics such as the creation of digital publics in Myspace.com (Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace), the design of culturally adaptive software (G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide), and the exploration of folksonomy (HT06, Tagging Paper, Taxonomy, Flickr, Academic Article, ToRead).

At Berkeley, boyd is advised by Peter Lyman and Mimi Ito. She holds an M.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied with Judith Donath at the Media Lab, and a B.A. from Brown University. boyd is frequently cited in top media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR and Salon.com. She even went toe-to-toe with scary old Bill O'Reilly once. boyd blogs at www.zephoria.org/thoughts/, a must-read destination for those interested in social technology.

This has been in my queue of things to watch for awhile. Danah is the leading thinker in this space. I highly suggest watching this.