
Own Your Online Brand - jasonlbaptiste
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/02/own-your-online-brand.html
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plaggypig
Sage advice. If you haven't done it yet you need to _own_ something
authoritative about yourself, e.g. yourname.com, or better yet yourname.tel,
which is like a business card at the DNS layer (with a window from the web of
course).

I also periodically delete my Facebook status updates and tweets, although I'm
not yet sure whether Google/others will be archiving those indefinitely.

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andyking
I bought andyking.eu when .eu names were first made available for just that
reason, although I only use it for email and not for any web presence - I blog
on a different domain.

Of course, having such a common name, very little about me appears on Google.
In fact, on Google UK at present the first result for my name is a British
strip-o-gram! There are also a former MP, a middling footballer and various
British and American academics with my name.

I'm quite happy with the situation, to be honest. The less that can be found
about me on Google, the more comfortable I feel. A friend has an uncommon name
and every result on the search engine is for her; every fleeting newspaper
mention, running club result and years-old web comment is hers. I'm glad I'm
not the same.

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DLWormwood
Part of me finds this mentality _horrifying_ , despite me having do it myself.

Simply put, I don't believe people, in general, should be _obligated_ to
participate in Facebook, Twitter, et al, in order to keep from being damaged
in the public sphere. If a person isn't doing anything noteworthy, he/she
should be allowed to keep to himself and not have to participate in these
kinds of social networks in the first place. I really doubt most people out
there would appreciate being _made to_ use stuff like this in self-defence.

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glen
Couldn't agree more! We at NIXTY think this is particularly important for a
person's future educational and occupational opportunities. A blog is great
and a LinkedIn profile is great too; however, we think what is needed is a
more robust ePortfolio - an online presence that has a cv/resume,
recommendations feature, and work display. The work display is particularly
important because it allows the person to post work (documents, videos, papers
etc.) that illustrate their competence. Further, it allows those w/credibility
(professor, supervisor) to comment on the work so that others can get a better
way of assessing a person's competence.The url for the person's eportfolio is
www.nixty.com/name.

People definitely need to be proactive about defining their presence online.
This is just one small way that we are trying to help.

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astrec
You might get more mileage if you prefix this comment with "shameless plug".

~~~
glen
Yikes. Posted quickly w/out thinking about it, while eating. You are right.
Would delete it if I could. Thanks for keeping me honest :). Will do better
next time.

