Comments on: controlling your public appearance

By: Nick Bowman

Nick Bowman — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 19:08:02 +0000

*as I make several mis-spellings above (sheesh!)

It’s an interesting debate – do we have a (qualified) right to privacy when online, or do we assume that there are always folks peering over our walls?

By: Nick Bowman

Nick Bowman — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 18:58:57 +0000

Coming to the conversation late, but I wonder if a good rule-of-thumb to pass along to students of social media would be “you might have a walled garden, but we can all see it … so you need to have a good green thumb!”. I tell my students that rather than focusing on how we can keep folks out, we should instead thing of what we are planting there in the first place!

In some ways, trying to grow these “walled gardens” goes against the social networking focus – connecting with users. The strength of our network is in the number of connections we can form, after all!

By: Diego Regalado

Diego Regalado — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 16:58:24 +0000

I believe that if people don’t want to be seen in a negative way then they shouldn’t post bad stuff about themselves. The Internet should for the most part be used constructively and if you put stuff up that you know could hurt you then you shouldn’t whine about it. This post tells the absolute truth, that if you want people to have a good appearance of you then you yourself should make it.

By: Jeff Bridge

Jeff Bridge — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 17:16:33 +0000

I was a bit ‘loose’ on Facebook until I realised that employers, or even worse, potential employers could easily search your name up and see exactly what you get up to. Even worse, each comment of FB is timestamped – a potential employer could easily discover that you use it during working hours! No job for you I’m afraid!

By: Alcira

Alcira — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:34:58 +0000

Ok, let me first say, I think you are very cool both as a person and as a researcher. I accidentally came across your blog and have been browsing for a while now. A lot of interesting posts… but this comment here upset me:

“And we have a name for anyone who goes out of their way to find that old stuff: stalker. And we don’t really wanna work for, date, or befriend genuine stalkers.”

Ok, so I’ve read a lot of your posts from 10+ years ago. But it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me if you haven’t advertised them in your bio… So I don’t think I am stalking you but maybe I am.:-O If you don’t want people to find/read things, don’t post them. I have to say though I am glad you have left those old entries up. I think there are probably many people that can relate to what you were going through. I do. There was one post that I read I thought I could have written it myself.

By: Milla Valkeasuo

Milla Valkeasuo — Sun, 11 May 2008 13:14:00 +0000

That was quite an interesting and informative article.

“We make mistakes, we’re all stupid, and we learn. ”

I totally agree with you.

By: Tragic Christian

Tragic Christian — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 14:31:09 +0000

Several years ago, i Googled myself for the first time. The first thing that came up was a letter to the editor I wrote to a PRINT magazine about 20 years before — this was pre-Internet, pre-anything. The people who ran the website where this appeared were stealing copy without permission from a variety of publications, apparently including letter columns. To my dismay, however, the website was named something like “hailsatan.com” This probably explained why I had a hard time finding a job at that time!

To the credit of Their Satanic Majesty, I wrote to them and said that I hadn’t given them permission to reprint my letter and I knew what they were doing was illegal, so take it off the website. They did so, actually, to their credit. And then I started putting up articles I’d written over the years on my own websites that showed me in a much better light, clicked on them repeatedly and asked my friends to do so, which drilled “hailsatan.com” way down into the depths of Google. Now what comes up most often, tho’, are reprints of my teenage fanzine science fiction of the 1970′s (which I DID give permission to reprint, but probably shouldn’t have!)

By: L. Kevin Cantu

L. Kevin Cantu — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 01:55:19 +0000

I recommend postings in things like forums for Linux distributions. Those are very aggressively indexed, so a little participation goes a long way. In fact, the Launchpad system seems to create fifteen million different user pages for you, so it immediately boosts that identity towards the top of many search results.

I hope my bug reports have been intelligent…

By: jeremy

jeremy — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 04:18:15 +0000

i really appreciate this post, as well as many of your other postings. i think you’re right that we have to be proactive about our identity online. it’s very parallel to controlling your identity in the workplace. you might be a banker who loves heavy metal, and just as you would never go to an alice cooper concert in a 3-piece suit, you would probably never go to work in a black leather and chains jacket. that is part of managing your image, which people view as your identity.
- jeremy

By: James Crowley

James Crowley — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 17:51:29 +0000

After 15 years of lurking online, this morning I registered a domain, signed up with a web host, and put up a placeholder blog. It’s not quite as impulsive as it seems — I’ve been doing intermittent “research” on this for a decade — but your post was the tipping point.

As someone who was (virtually) impossible to find via Google until very recently, I’m more than a little ambivalent. But in the long run I suspect it’s for the best, largely for reasons you cover above.

FWIW, the last time I was really ready to do this, several years back, I was quite miffed to find that someone had recently registered “my” domain name: apophenia.com. My annoyance has long since been replaced by gratitude that I’ve been able to follow your work since before you were “Internet Famous”.

My thanks,

–James Crowley