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Say what? 'Humans are migratory beasts'

Natalie Weinstein Former Senior Editor / News
I spent a decade as a reporter and editor before joining the CNET News staff as a copy editor in 2000, right before the dot-com bust.
Expertise Copy editing. Curating, editing and reading newsletters of all stripes. Playing any word-related game, specifically Scrabble, Wordle and Boggle. Credentials
  • I've been a journalist for more than three decades. I was a finalist in the 2021 Digiday Media Award for Best Newsletter.
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Natalie Weinstein

Perhaps we haven't really shed our ancient way of life when we humans followed our food. Or maybe we've got a lot more in common with caribou than we'd like to believe.

Either way, Marc Canter thinks he understands human nature. "Humans are migratory beasts," said Canter, a former Tribe.net consultant.

What Canter's actually referring to is the nature of people's movements on the Web and his support for OpenID, which lets people easily transfer profile data among social-networking sites. "We do not want to re-enter our data every time we join a new site. Users own their data and should be able to move it around freely," he said in a New York Times article, which will be posted on News.com until it "expires" next Monday.

Tribe.net, a small social-networking site, was scooped up Monday by Cisco Systems. Apparently, networking gear giant Cisco is also a migratory beast, following the money wherever it may lead.