Building an Online Identity

More and more people are using the internet each day. They register with all kinds of social media services, comment on forums and newspaper articles, sell and buy stuff on eBay, write reviews on Amazon, and much, much more. But some of those people probably have the same name or nickname than you. How can you make sure that you are not mistaken for someone else?

So recently I have been thinking more about building an online identity and what it really implies. And quite frankly, I am still not sure where it starts and where it ends. At first everything seemed to be very obvious: aggregating my various profiles on social media sites and I am done. Actually that meant I didn’t even need to start building an identitly because I am already using various profile aggregators. Problem solved, next topic to think about. Not really, though.

Why?

But why should I – or even you – build an online identity? Make my name a brand on the web? Is it really a problem if I am mistaken for someone else? That could be funny sometimes. Well, here’s my reason. You might have another one:

At the time I started blogging a Google search for me wasn’t very successful. Most results were relating to another Carsten Pötter, a German chemist who obviously has some rather strange views (e.g. commenting on an anti-semitic site). Only a few postings made on various forums were relating to me. As you can imagine I was not amused (not because I was hardly visible in Google’s search results, mind you). Actually I went ballistic just by the thought that someone was searching for me and discovered the comments on those dodgy sites and associated them with me. Something had to be done.

What have I done so far?

Google likes blogs. They are updated regularly and usually rank pretty high which is a nice side-effect of blogging, albeit an unintentional one in my case. I was not aware of it when I wrote my first blog post; I just didn’t know much about PageRank and SEO. So blogging is certainly an effective way to make yourself more visible on the web. Nowadays a search for Carsten Pötter is generating more and better results relating to me; there are some differences between Google.de and Google.com though.

Aggregating profiles from various social media sites I am registered with seems to be important as well. They are spread all over the web. So having them all in one central place helps building an identity, I think.

I have also registered another domain, carstenpoetter.de but I have not utilised it yet. And actually I still don’t know how.

Summary

My blog is still separated from my profiles – the Wink widget is the link between them, though – and the carstenpoetter.de domain lies dormant at the moment. My OpenID’s are all collected on claimID, but that’s also separated from my blog. What about my various email addresses? Should they be part of an online identity? What about my friends and contacts?

Has anyone build a meaningful online identity yet? What can I do? What am I missing? Feel free to leave a comment.