Welcome to AOL I have accepted a job at AOL. I will be working in the Community divlet, managing the design team that creates the community products - groups, chat, message boards etc. This is a chance for me to get back into creating tools for people and AOL is certainly tha place to do it. I have gotten emails from my friends congratulating me and the friends at Microsoft jokingly call me a traitor. Of course when I went to WebTV - owned by Microsoft - all my friends not at Microsoft called me a traitor going to the darkside. Either way it will be interesting to be back at a large corporation where you have to make impressions in small ways. To me it is about the work and making tools and places that make a difference in the way people interact.

The ironic part to all of this, is that I had an AOL account many years ago - so long ago that I had "emalone" as a screen name with out any numbers. Once I became more saavy with my ISP and stopped doing work for AOL (which paid for my account) I cancelled my account and have only had my emdezine account since. Now I will be getting an AOL account again and will probably have to pick a number for a screen name. In the road to individual freedom and the empowerment that the online world has given to people - we are all ultimately reduced to being numbers.