Your Online Identity
Posted on January 20, 2004
Filed Under computers |
Loic Le Meur posts some tips about managing your online identity. I’ve had a pretty decent web footprint since I’ve been authoring web pages for my pursuits as far back as doing Reality Break pages in 1994 or 1995. I heard tell of a party game where writers were googling their own names (NOT in quotes, as separate words) in a SF con suite and seeing how few listings you could go down before it was really about the writer in question. In my case, last time I checked you have to go down 29 or so to find one that isn’t about me. It helps that my name is not a common one - this game is definitely not too fun if you happen to be named John Smith. I’m a small fish, I’m sure some of the real biggies could go thousands down and all still be them.
I do think Loic’s advice is sensible. People will google your name so you ought to get a sense of what happens when someone does. When I go to job interviews, I search on the names of people I’ll be talking to. If they have writings, I read up on them first. It’s worked very well for me and I’m amazed more folks don’t do this. I had a friend recently who discovered that searching on his company name gave his resume as one of the top ten google hits. That’s definitely a good news/bad news type situation. Isn’t it good to know about that first, rather than finding out when the boss calls you into the corner office?
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3 Responses to “Your Online Identity”
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Let’s continue talking about online reputation…
I get bummed out when I google my own name. I did it about a year ago and got a dude by the same name who runs a KKK website (ironic,huh?) and when I just did it a second ago, the 14th thing was about some dude getting caught masturbating on his front porch. His first name was Douglas, though.
Well, you’ve already started to fix that with your weblog. Eventually that will start taking care of itself. You’ll eventually claim it back.