Have you Googled yourself lately?
Enjoyable, excellent, relevant: Linton Weeks of The Washington Post writes about why you should Google yourself — to learn what other people know about you.
“Public embarrassment has been the growth industry in the United States for the last few years,” he says [that's Bob Reno, who runs Badjocks.com, where you can see "athletes behaving badly"]. “You’ve got a generation that is growing up with digital cameras and camera phones, and they are encouraging each other and being encouraged by popular media and by the technology companies to document everything they do.”
Call it individual reputation management. (The coinage “publizens” is lame. I hope that doesn’t catch on.)
Probably something we should be teaching the kids in school.
Technorati tags: search | online media | privacy
This is indeed a problem, but I think as the technology matures we’ll begin to see more ways to secure our Web identities.
For instance, the Web2.0 site ClaimID allows you to “claim” sites you either created or have content on. You can then link to your profile to show folks the legitiment “you.”
July 27, 2006 at 3:35 amFunnily enough, a big part of the article is about people who really do “manage” their online reputations. They know exactly how visible they are, and they choose to make certain things public — even things you might think they would prefer to keep private.
July 27, 2006 at 1:51 pm