Controlling your Online Identity
ComputerWorld has an article entitled Web anonymity can sink your job search, which explains the benefits to having a well-controlled online identity; one of the best, if not the best, ways of doing this is by publishing your own blog, so that when recruiters, or anyone, for that matter, checks you out in Google (and everyone is doing it), they see what you want them to see, not what others may have said. Of course, sometimes you want to blog and NOT associate your identity with what you are writing about; the anonymity of the Internet allows one to participate in conversations that are of interest, but might not be related to one’s professional identity. In such a case, it’s important to take careful control of how your blog and personal information are presented online.
One of, if not the, most frequent support requests we get is from bloggers who’s real-world identity has been associated with their personal blog. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, mothers, priests, rabbis; you name it, they’ve contacted us and asked to have their real names removed from Blogdigger. We are certainly happy to comply, we want to do the best we can to protect a blogger’s privacy. But in almost every case where we are contacted, the same thing has happened: the blog hosting software includes the bloggers real name by default in the blog’s syndicated feed. This tends to be an issue with paid blogging services where a user is required to enter contact information for payment purposes. When services that feed off blog’s syndication feeds, such as search engine like Blogdigger, or aggregators like Bloglines, the author’s full name is available and searchable.
Often, these blogging services have settings to publish a nickname instead of the user’s real name, but the nickname setting is not the default. When setting up a blog, or taking any action online, it’s important to take into account how you are associating your actions with you personal identity, and to do that, it’s important to understand how blog service providers work, and what tools are available to help track your online identity. A mistake could be around for a while.
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