The Basics of Managing Your Online Identity
June 22, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
As social-media spreads and becomes even more ubiquitous you need the tools to manage and control your personal identity and reputation online. Use the the following 10 steps to enhance your toolset.
- Buy yourname.com Even if you don’t plan to start a blog or build a web site immediately, you should own your own domain. Having a single point on the web for authoritative information about yourself is key to managing your online identity. I recommend buying domains from GoDaddy (it’s only $8 a year!)
- Set up Google Alerts for your name.
- Google your name (or for a more proactive approach, set up a Google Alert for your name)
- Make a list of all the places where you have content on the web, discussion boards, chat rooms, blogs, news websites, comments, etc. All of this content is traceable back to you, make sure it reflects your online identity goals.
- Decide what social-networking sites you are going to spend more time on than others, also look at what an appropriate amount of conversation and information is acceptable at each site.
- Monitor what images, messages, and spam are hitting your social-networking site profile pages. Have a MySpace? Delete the spam from your wall. Have Facebook? Untag yourself from questionable photographs or ask the poster to take them down. And certainly if you have photos or messages in any of your social-networking sites that don’t fit well with your online identity goals, take them down or delete them.
- Don’t delete your social networking accounts! Having a presence on the web isn’t a bad thing, just make sure that the information available puts you in a positive light.
- Read and comment on blogs. This should probably be higher up in my list, but participating in the numerous conversations happening at any given moment is a huge opportunity to meet new people, gain knowledge, and share knowledge which is what social-media is all about.
- Give back what you take in. If you learn something online, spread it around. Share the love, both in the form of links, emails, instant messages, etc. If you appreciate what someone is doing let them know.
- Each of us has our own set of skills and knowledge, you know things that others don’t. It isn’t difficult to reach out and connect with others who have similar knowledge, or who know more than you. Find those people and connect with them. Social media isn’t social without you.
Managing your online identity takes some time when you’re just starting out, but it’s worth it in the end when you have networks and connections with people you never knew existed. The sharing and the knowledge and the conversations that happen each day are amazing, and if you’re a part of it, your online identity will prosper.
Social Networking Quick Tips
June 22, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
Different Social Networking sites are good for different things. You don’t want the same information on all of the sites.
Here are some things to keep in mind:
1) Facebook is a personal experience. Put your favorite movies, TV shows, and inspiration quotes on the page. Add a few applications that reflect positively on the hobbies and interests that you have.
2) MySpace is impersonal and highly commercial. This site was given over to spammers and tweens a long time ago, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have an account and have control of myspace.com/yourname though. Put a couple images up, make some friend connections, and move on.
3) LinkedIn is your professional resource. Take advantage of all of it’s features. People have been known to get hired because they posted or answers questions on the LinkedIn discussion area. Make connections with people and use those connections, send a friendly message every now and again, ask for recommendations from coworkers and supervisors when appropriate, be sure to link out to your personal portfolio or other social-networking site identities.
4) If you’re not Twittering you should be. If you don’t want to, sign up anyway and try it out. There is a lot of value locked up in those 140 characters and you should understand the system and how it works even if you aren’t going to participate.
5) Social networking is a lot of work, people quickly figure out when you’ve abandoned a particular site, or are only using it for professional purposes. Be personal, be professional. You have to find the right blend for you that fits into your growth goals.
This post is part of Jonathan Coffman’s Lessons In Social Media series.
Mollom - Spam Control and More
April 24, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
I came across this service a little earlier in the week and can’t wait to give it a try! It is quite possibly the first real competitor to Akismet for community spam filtering and control. The Drupal community is all up in arms with praise for the beta-service.
Sometime next week I think I’ll toss it onto one of my Drupal sites and see how it does for a while. While I’ve been pretty happy with Akismet (which I use on this site), competition is always a good thing and everyone likes to detect and delete spam.
What appears to be the claim to fame with Mollom is that learns from it’s mistakes and your content. Apparently one of the features in the pipe is content filtering, like nuking inappropriate language from community sites. While the community sites that I’ve managed haven’t had much of a language problem, those things do happen and varying defense levels certainly help to quell managerial fear.
If you’ve used http://mollom.com/javascript:mctmp(0); let me know your thoughts.
Jonathan’s Twitter Updates for 2008-04-06
April 6, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- There’s a turkey clucking out in the woods behind my house somewhere this morning. #
- Walking Dowm Memory Lane: The World’s First Web Site: http://info.cern.ch/ #
- I’m currently perusing job listings #
- Searching the Interwebs for a job, don’t want my leads to dry up #
- Just finished mowing the yard and putting down some grass seed, hopefully I cant get it looking nice #
- @corvida @scobleizer Oh that Scoble, he just THINKS he’s first to everything!
# - @bryanperson Thank goodness for the "block application/person" button on Facebook huh? #
- @chrisbrogan, if you’re interested the good folks at Twitter can do that for you if you ask them nicely. #
- @chrisbrogan true, no one likes the robots #
- Just got done ‘cleaning out’ some of the "people" I follow on Twitter, and my "people" I mean "robots and spammers"
# - Also took the opportunity to add more of you to my SMS list, don’t want to miss the conversation! #
- @josh_nelson I don’t get HBO but I hear that John Adams is a pretty intriguing series. I’m a Sopranos fan myself. #
- @acafourek hmm, because they’re freaking out of their minds?!? #
- I’ll have to wait for the DVDs to come out so I can add it to my Netflix I guess. #
- @shawnz hehe! Keep the illusion (or are you a great cook?) alive! #
Jonathan’s Twitter Updates for 2008-04-01
April 1, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- Made it back to Columbia, now comes the hard part, unpacking! #
- @chrisbrogan you seem like an ideal candidate for GrandCentral actually #
- @xphilter welcome to the club! #
- @lavosby I encourage SL to further adopt Twitter posts as a great way to enhance the ‘community’ surrounding your services. #
- @kambei, the real magic is when you hand a youngster an iPhone and they ‘know’ how to use it - it’s that user friendly! - #
- Wow, Blockbuster has now spammed two of my email accounts with "it’s been a while since you’ve rented, come back and try Total Access again" #
- @csamuel what’s your first app going to be? I’m still waiting for my invite #
- @mightykenny I currently have Netflix and love it! #
- @mightykenny I hadn’t realized they did that with the high def content, I’ll have to investigate (although I’m not HD yet) #
- I just successfully upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5 - It was mostly painless, took about 15 minutes total #
- Good late morning twitterville, whole slew of errands scheduled today #
- Reading up on the April 1 jokes by Google today #
- @jackieKazil I’m reading coverage of this year’s Jokes on TC: Build Your Very Own Google Airplane <http://tinyurl.com/2pkb4y> #
- ha! Google Calendar "I’m feeling lucky" button got me a date with Paris Hilton tonight… #
- @Scobleizer as does Kansas City International Airport, Free WiFi rocks! #
- @acafourek you mean there is sun in Missouri? or just ‘natural light’ #
- Took care of my academic duties by getting a cap and gown for graduation today, only a few weeks late #
- I’m in a class that just had an ambush award of $10k for the professor by University top officials #
- It’s a great day when people who love their jobs and provide such a great public service are thanked in a public way #
- @chrisbrogan, I have to disagree, I vote to get rid of landlines altogether. I haven’t had one for 3.5 years now and won’t look back #
- Just back from going to the grocery store with a friend, I’ve some blogging I need to do tonight! #
- @cimota @chockenberry sure there is, hit the "shift" key twice and it illuminates blue, caps lock #
Jonathan’s Twitter Updates for 2008-03-19
March 19, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- @ftmedianews would you spend the extra money for an iPhone if it came with unlimited music from the WiFi store? #
- @davidherrold you got that right you do! #
- @guykawasaki you just spit those Alltops out all the time like there’s no tomorrow! #
- @guykawasaki when does the Alltop of Alltop headlines get released? Sort of a greatest hits of Alltop #
- @conniereece you Tweet so often with so many people I can only imagine how crazy it must be to be you #
- @mrpopular you’re following 900+ people with only one Tweet, are you going to be a spammer? #
- @minimage ha! I had a Blackjack for a while so I’ve use WinMob and it was a difficult life… come on over to the iPhone land, u know yo … #
- @shegeeks true, they’re not widgets perse, but I think the interactivity and always-there-ness is what widgets *want* to be. #
- @susanreynolds how many have you nixed so far? #
- @guykawasaki, I bet it does take a fair amount of time to do the research. If you need another helper, look me up #
- @dlpasco Let us know when you get one, I’ve got my application for an application and cert in. #
- @sernovitz I have no idea, but let me know if you do find it, that would be a hugely interesting ‘nugget’ to know how to find. #
- @susanreynolds you’ve got a tough job ahead of you, so much content flying at you all the time! #
- @conniereece I haven’t started using Tweetscan, but I get SMS’s all the freaking time, it annoys the people around me lol! #
- @bananasontoast, I haven’t seen an Overheard as funny as that in a long time #
- @conniereece I too have been hoping for more Mobile controls, like my ‘favorite favorites’ of the 20 people I ALWAYS want SMSs from #
- @conniereece SMSs from the people I most want to hear from, even when sms is turned off from the main ’stream’ that I get constantly. #
- @conniereece My iPhone doesn’t have a red flashing light! lol. It’s usually on vibrate though, it’s only bad when it’s sitting on my desk. #
- @jnil I bet that’s one of the first things that gets created with the SDK, although right now your best option might be HTML? or Email? #
- @jnil It’d be my quick and dirty solution anyway, if you find something else do let me know though #
- @minimage Maybe in July you can make the big switch! #
- @infinitypro Why thank you! #
- Good Morning Twitterville! #
- Busy day working on several projects at once #
- How is everyone today? #
- @rentzsch Yup, I’ve used Time Machine more in the last several months to restore files that I never would have done before. #
- The person i am supposed to be meeting with is 30 minutes late.
# - Just ordered a new 4-core super server with a big fatty Internet pipe for Contributr, this thing is going to be screaming! #
Convergence of the Future
March 19, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
News makers keep talking about backpack journalists and having reporters be good at everything. Now we all know that’s just not possible, but it hasn’t stopped the visionaries from proclaiming convergence journalism the future of news.
Convergence of the media is already happening of course, and convergence is the future. No longer is a television station just a television station. Or a radio station, just a radio station. I’ve been interviewing with news organizations trying to find a full-time gig after graduation and I recently met with a newspaper editor from a small-market.
He said something to the effect that “I’m not just running a newspaper, I’m also a TV station, Radio station, podcaster, blogger, information resource, and that’s on top of the seven printed products my newsroom produces”. This is what convergence is, its one media taking on and challenging the other media forms.
Back in the early days of my Journalism School experience they taught about how the Internet wasn’t the end-all of media, much to the contrary each individual media had its own benefits. Well, yes that’s true in part, each form of media (broadcast, print, online, social, etc) does have distinct advantages and disadvantages, but that’s the great thing about the Internet, it allows each of those media to succeed and distribute their product in an open-market of consumers and viewers.
The Internet brings all of those competing old-media technologies and pardon the cliche, it creates synergies between them. No longer is a newspaper just a newspaper, but instead its a radio station, tv station, web site, and a community in and of itself.
This is the Real future of convergence journalism, a combined news product that reaches all people equally and in multiple formats. We’re already doing this in many cases but news makers haven’t taken it far enough yet.
Convergence journalism to me is all about taking advantage of the things that make a particular medium what it is. Television is immensely visual for instance, but a 30 minute newscast can’t begin to touch the detail a 1,500 word article in a major newspaper can. The power of the Internet changes all that.
The power of the Internet creates an open marketplace of ideas from which news consumers can ingest and even create their own news and information resources. One of the goals for my Contributr project is just that, make the communication between the public and a news organization easy for both parties so that both are more likely to interact and create even better news for the communities (and the world) that they serve.
If you’re interested in hearing more of my ideas on the future of journalism and the things that can be right now, subscribe to my RSS feed right here and always get the latest blog posts.
As always, comments are always open on this blog (although the first time you post I may have to approve it to make sure you’re not a spam robot) so join the conversation!
Jonathan’s Twitter Updates for 2008-03-15
March 15, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- Syncing up my new iPhone ringtones, made two of them tonight #
- I now have "New Soul" (The Macbook AIR song), and "Perfect Timing" (The iPhone commercial song). Cool stuff! #
- 150,000 spam trackback pings to a site that isn’t even live yet, is this the world we live in? #
- Blocking Spammers and Taking Names! (although I’m using IP banning which is less than a good way to do it) #
- Now down to 6-10 spam pings per minute instead of 100+ per minute yay! #
- Done wiping out Spammers from SmartDecision. Hopefully not too many innocent bystanders got blocked in the process #
- Installing Drupal 6.1 and WordPress 2.5 to play around with on my development server #
- wow it’s taking forever to upload and download these files from the server. Multitasking isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. #
- Still messing around on the Internet, it’s about time to work on Contributr again though. #
- Just finished watching "Little Miss Sunshine". It reminds of a ‘dark’ Chevy Chase xmas vacation type of show #
- @junglemason that’s quite an Overheard, and hilarious too! #
links for 2008-02-26
February 26, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
links for 2008-02-25
February 25, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
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