Social web and identity: a likely encounter

The Web 2.0, with online social technologies such as social networkingservices, blogs, wikis, or microbloging, has brought the vision of the Internet as asocial landscape in which people are engaged in a multitude of social activities. Thiseditorial of the special issue ‘Social Web and Identity’ discusses the importance ofidentity in the context of the Social Web, introducing the different papers of thisspecial issue and the different aspects associated to these online identities. The topicscovered in this issue include how people define their identity in blogs and what is thearticulation between online and offline identities in these systems. It also presents anarticle studying the privacy issues in online social networks and more specificallyhow these risks are perceived and how people can control their identity in thiscontext. The next article compares privacy in two different categories of socialsystems (social network and collaborative workspace). Finally, another articlediscusses to what extent the current legislation, such the data protection regulationsdirective 95/46/EC, is providing the right instrument for dealing with privacy issues