Danah Boyd is an internationally recognized authority on the ways people use networked social media, where people can use their computer or mobile phone to connect with friends, share information, and generate content. She knows who inhabits the world of on-line social networks like MySpace and Facebook, what they do there, and why.

She has studied how people develop online identities and how they use them to socialize on the internet, and she's designed tools for enhancing online identity presentation. boyd's blog (Apophe-nia: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts ) is a valuable resource for anyone interested in social media. Much of her current work focuses on how youth and those under 25 use social media to socialize.boyd has advised a wide range of companies on social media, including Yahoo!, Google, Tribe.net, and Intel.

Boyd spent five years creating and managing a large-scale online community for V-Day, a non- profit organization working to end violence against women and girls worldwide.

Boyd is a Ph.D candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a Fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communications. She was an Intel Fellow, 2000 - 2002 and an MIT Presidential Fellow.

She earned her masters degree at MIT studying how internet users represent themselves to each other. She was part of the Sociable Media Group at MIT MediaLab.

She is on the advisory board of Technorati, O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference, SXSW-Interactive, and Blogher.

Boyd has been profiled in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Magazine and Financial Times, which called her "one of the chief thinkers of the MySpace age."

NOTE: This bio appeared in the October 3, 2007 program for our "Tech Revolution" Forum.