Building an Online Identity

March 18, 2007 in General by Carsten Pötter | 6 comments

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.

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  1. Thomas Huhn’s avatar

    Thomas Huhn on March 29, 2007 at 13:09

    Hi Carsten,

    I found the link to this excellent article on your very interesting profile page at http://carsten.poetter.meinguter.name/

    I hope this page brings you one step further in building an online identity, because that´s exactly what we´re aiming to with http://meinguter.name.

    We´re looking forward to bring you much more possibilities for aggregating your public available identity information in the future and we hope you will enjoy taking part in this evolution.

    Cheers,
    Thomas

  2. Carsten Pötter’s avatar

    Carsten Pötter on March 29, 2007 at 18:29

    Hey Thomas,

    I just discovered http://meinguter.name last night. My first reaction was: a German claimID. The approach to OpenID and online identity seems to be similar and since the domain name makes sense I decided to sign up, although I have another OpenID (I have stopped counting by now) and another aggregator now. ;)
    Cheers,
    Carsten

  3. Jennifer H.’s avatar

    Jennifer H. on April 4, 2007 at 23:35

    Hi Thomas,

    I’ve been researching a similiar topic and have checked out quite a few sites. It’s kind of strange, how the niche-site craze is creating new and exciting markets. I think a solid identity is important, and I’d like to check myself into the social-network pipeline as best as possible. From my review I think that http://www.profilefly.com seems to stand out the most, as means to unify your identity into one site. Good luck!

    Best,

  4. Carsten Pötter’s avatar

    Carsten Pötter on April 5, 2007 at 00:34

    For further reference check my comment over there.

  5. SEO’s avatar

    SEO on July 22, 2007 at 10:05

    My main concern is that you can’t guarantee every page of your website will be included in the SERPs. Considering I’m constantly adding new products to my company’s website, I need to be sure that customers can find them as soon as possible.http://www.seoptimizerz.com

  6. Monica’s avatar

    Monica on October 13, 2007 at 00:35

    I to have struggled with this — especially when it comes to marketing and you are faced with a daunting array of blogs, article sites, web 2.0 sites, seo, and on and on. You want to unite it altogether in a cohesive way - easier said than done I suppose.