I use social computing for a variety of reasons. Probably first and foremost, social computing is part of an online brand strategy for me. Not that Me, Patrick Ryan,  needs a brand presence online.  No,  I am not interested in selling myself to you. By "brand strategy," I mean the digital footprint one creates as part of an online identity that can be used for all kinds of social experiments.  I like playing with various identities and personas online. 

So, I have taken elements from my life and created an aggregate of various factors of my real life and put them into the public domain for the purpose of using these identities to create different projects, ideas, and new-genre interactions.