Establishing your Web Presence

Do you have public presence on the web?

I guess I could just as easily rephrase this question into “do you exist on the internet?”, because that’s what it essentially boils down to. If you do not have some sort of public profile, then for all intents and purposes you are a non person in our world wide digital village. You are a digital ghost who can be mention by name, but cannot be linked to, or googled. You are an analog being living in an analog world, and your connection to the digital superhighway is at best one sided. You are a non-entity in the world in the binary world inhabited by us infovores.

I’m not saying this is bad thing – there are obvious privacy benefits to such a lifestyle. As long as you stay out of public awareness, you remain invisible. Of course if you ever do accomplish anything, other people will build you an online presence via all kinds of Wikis and info-aggregation portals. Lots of folks are perfectly fine with letting strangers craft their public image – after all, that’s how it was always done in the ye olde 20th century. Back then your public persona was perpetually out of your hands, and revealed to the public via mass media.

But, thankfully, we no longer live in the 20th century. Nowadays you have a great deal of control in how you present yourself to the rest of the internet via personal pages, social networks and etc. You can take control, and establish a legit source of information about you and your projects, unmarred by what your detractors or haters may or may not have to say. Given a choice people will tend to consult your “official” pages, rather than some 3rd party hearsay. Not only that, but today it is incredibly easy to establish your own web presence.

When I was starting my career as a professional geek and a netizen of the World Wild Web putting yourself out there was not an easy task. Step one was to learn some HTML. Step two was to collect bunch of animated “UNDER CONSTRUCTION” gifs. Step three was to sign up for Geocities of Tripod or some other crazy place like that and start hacking on atrociously looking web page featuring said gifs.

Nowadays, it is so much easier. Let’s look at some really quick and easy to build yourself a linkable online persona.

Social Networks

Your go-to social network should be Twitter. Everyone has twitter account these days. All the celebrities, all the companies, all the politicians. Twitter is mainstream now. News anchors read tweets during evening news and try to pass it off as journalism. You just can’t go wrong with Twitter. It takes seconds to set up, and it really does not take a lot of effort to maintain a moderately active profile. Just take page from what some of the more popular celebs do – don’t tweet about your lunch, or the color of your poop. Tweet witty one liners, and silly musings that pop into your head and you might even build a small audience over a longer period of time.

Google+ is a decent choice too – it is favored by the geekier crowd, and it may make you appear less hip which might be the exact image you might be looking for. I keep my G+ clean and professional and write about technology and programming there. The circles mechanic, and the fact most of your RL friends are not on there are a plus in my book – less chances for shenanigans.

Your Facebook should be locked down tighter than Fort Knox. Between the friends who love to tag you in embarrassing party pictures, intensely personal “relationship” stalking mechanics, and overall gossip fodder atmosphere, this is part of your online life you should not expose to the internet as a whole. Public Facebook profile can be throughly data mined for all kinds of personal information. HR departments now train their desk monkeys to do this for all job applicants, so having an open Facebook profile is just asking for trouble. A Twitter account is lower profile, and it reveals less in terms of your social activities.

Blogs

Blogs ain’t cool anymore, I know that. But they are also a great way to establish an online presence, and make your voice known. They get the message across much more clearly than twitter, and in a way look more respectable. You can easily establish a free blog via Blogger or WordPress and start publishing articles. If you find your voice, and gain an audience you can easily transition to a self hosted blog. That’s what I did back in 2006.

Github

Some people don’t have much to say, but do have a lot to show. I happen to run my mouth here about possible projects and potential ideas but I hardly ever implement them. There are people out there who are the opposite – they implement their ideas, but don’t usually feel the need to build a narrative around that creative work. For them, the best kind of online presence is a solid Github account… Er… Or equivalent – I don’t know what do people in humanities and arts use to showcase their work. Deviant Art? Anyone?

Despite a popular belief you can learn a lot about a person just by browsing their git repositories (or their art, or whatever) – like what sorts of things interest them, what languages they uses, how they tackle problems, etc…

You can also take advantage from programmer centric social services that feed off GitHub. Good example are places such as MasterBranch or CoderWall. They let you showcase your work, connect with other professionals and etc..

Not to mention that you can easily build yourself a Jekyll powered blog using GitHub pages the way our own Chris Wellons did.

Landing Pages

If you just want a simplistic online presence with no blog, repository or social aspect, there are services for that too. You could easily build yourself an About.me profile. All you need is a nice big picture, some text blurb and maybe a link. Nice thing about having a simple landing page like this is that it will make you searchable and linkable, it will give people ability to contact you (via their email proxy service) but it is not very conducive to intense data mining. For some folks it is simplest, and best solutions.

Own Domain

Nothing says awesome like your own domain name. Actually, no scratch that. There are plenty of things that are more awesome than that. But having your last name in the domain of your email address does have a certain air of professionalism. Despite popular belief, hosting your own site is not a big expense. I’m not even talking about the bottom of the barrel $5 per month shared hosting plans. You can establish a website an an email with a custom domain for about $10 a year. How? Use Goole Apps for your domain.

The only thing you pay for is domain registration through Google. Once you fork over the cash, Google will set up your professional looking email, and configure it with Gmail interface. You can also use the Google Sites service to craft yourself a nifty web page using their WYSIWYG editor. It’s quick, easy, painless and almost free.

Did I miss anything? What was your first website on the internet? Let me know in the comments.

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9 Responses to Establishing your Web Presence

  1. icebrain PORTUGAL Mozilla Firefox Linux Terminalist says:

    Ghost here ;)

    I have a Twitter account, but with its two(!) messages, it doesn’t give people much of a image of myself. Then I have a profile page of MyOpenId (hosted on my own domain thanks to some CNAME magic) which only has my name and email.

    I had a blog, but frankly I never had anything to post there, so it just lingered until the hosting account got canceled.

    The only important account I have with my real name is StackOverflow/Exchange, because they represent some actual knowledge and I won’t post personal opinions or information there. They have more of what I’d like a stranger to read about me than any other account.

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  2. StDoodle UNITED STATES Google Chrome Windows says:

    Heh, with a last name like “Wood” (it’s no Smith, but it isn’t rare by a long shot), I think I would have had to register my last name as a domain around ’96…. Hell, immediate family members have met two people with the same first & last name as myself just within 100 miles of where I was born. (This also makes searching for me on the internet rather difficult, unless you know a few key facts to help narrow it down… which overall I find to be a good thing.)

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  3. Github is importantly noted. If you code, it’s an awesome medium of choice.

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  4. Greg UNITED STATES Internet Explorer Windows says:

    I’m so stalkable online that it’s a shame. Google my name and you find out just about everything. Thankfully, I don’t really have any dark secrets.

    My first domain (since you asked) was swingmonkey.com back in 2000/2001, and then I wrote my own blog software in 2004, which has been continually modified into frankencode, and still runs. I wrote a post last summer about the way that the evolution of social networks was making my blog mostly obsolete, and yet I continue to blog for some reason. Maybe it’s just habit.

    By the way, don’t heckle me for using IE7. I’m at work and they block everything. Even Chrome portable on a usb stick. Even when I spoof the user-agent. Second thought, you can heckle. I sure do.

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  5. well..
    there is mainly my blog/domain where everything that i want to keep forever takes place. But most things there are kept in german.
    Regarding Social Networks, i use mainly twitter (@drazraeltod) and Diaspora* (drazraeltod@pod.geraspora.de).

    Until Q4 last year i used Google Reader _extremely_ active for sharing newsposts and the likes. But then Google discontinued that.
    Then I used Google+ for Testing, but nowadays i only visit if somebody mentions me or i get noticed on any other way. For everything else, my account(s – one via google.com and 1-2 via google apps for your domain… not beeing able to combine such things just plainly sucks) there are pretty much dead. It’s just too much of a hassle and gives not much of gain.

    Github (DrAzraelTod) – well i just created an account there some weeks ago (i know: “WHAT?”) and maybe i am using it more often in the future.. we’ll see

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  6. Luke Maciak UNITED STATES Google Chrome Linux Terminalist says:

    @ icebrain:

    Oh, I forgot about Stack Overflow and similar sites. In fact some services, like Masterbranch will actually use your Stack Overflow reputation in your profile, which is neat.

    @ StDoodle:

    True. Smiths and Woods of the world may have a hard time making a personal domain happen. Although sometimes you may get lucky and be able to register firsnamelastname.tld if at least your parents decided to give you a less common name. Which is all the more reason to buy your last-name domain if it’s available. You may not have use for it, but your kids may.

    @ Greg:

    I added you to my Google Reader and followed you on Twitter. :)

    You make an interesting point about blogging being pushed out by social media. I lamented this very point myself at different times. Blogging ain’t cool no more. When I first got the inkling of an idea of starting a blog, it was the hottest buzzword on the web. Everyone was blogging. Bloging, podcasting and starting to vlog and it seemed like a brand new world out there. Nowadays most of the 1000+ blogs in my Google Reader are dead.

    Every once in a while I go through them and cull the ones that have been silent for a while. It’s a bit depressing.

    But then again, this is sort of par for the course for online things. I have been around long enough to be able to recognize the cycle. Every once in a while a buzzword or a concept captivates the internet and drives it into a memetic fervor for a few years. Then the interest fades, and people start chasing the next big thing. Social media replaced blogging as the buzzworthy new medium mostly because it lowered barrier to entry for online publishing.

    But I don’t think it could replace blogging completely. For one, I don’t think I could accomplish what I did here at TI via social media. Somehow along my blogging career I have managed to attract a group of really smart, and insightful people who comment here regularly. This was mostly thanks to few lucky breaks – being on digg and reddit, being linked by other tech blogs, etc.

    Social media and blogs both give average internet users a platform for publishing their thoughts but they differ in the scope:

    – Blog lend themselves to long-form, thought out articles while social media tends to favor the more immediate, and short information busts

    – Social networks are walled gardens perfect for impromptu sharing personal information with varying degrees of privacy. You use them for chit-chat, and conversations. Blogs are soap boxes you use for public speech – you use them to pontificate and preach (usually to the choir).

    – Blogs tend to be topical, whereas social networks are personal.

    So in a way, social media may be pushing out the “personal blog” but not the more structured blogs with established focus, and theme. Which is not a bad thing. The silly thing about the blogging explosion in early 00′ was that people used the medium to talk about their cats, their breakfast or how they hate the morning traffic. Since then, that sort of thing got pushed into social media. Blogs that stayed on the battlefield had focus and purpose beyond the “let me tell you about the crappy day I’ve had” formula.

    @ Dr. Azrael Tod:

    How do you like Diaspora? Do people actually use it? Like more people than Google+?

    I have never used the sharing function in Reader much. It sucks they removed it, but I can kinda see why. It’s part of their push to integrate G+ into fucking everything. You can more or less get the sharing functionality back by setting up G+ profile, and publicly sharing the posts on your profile.

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  7. Well.. Diaspora is buggy, lacking important features and in some aspects hardly usable.
    But still.. it’s currently sufficient and since many people from C3D2 (Chaos Computer Club Dresden, the local Hackerspace) and IRC hang around there, its pretty much the platform that i use most (far more then twitter and the likes).

    The reader-sharing function had one important difference to the current version via Google+: it was usable.
    With share, i just typed “shift+s” and was done, comments could have been integrated better, but it was sufficient. Now i would have to use the mouse, click share, type in text, press enter and then reselect the reader window before i could continue navigating via keyboard.
    With all this hassle, it was easier for me to switch the platform for sharing links completely.

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  8. Matt` UNITED KINGDOM Mozilla Firefox Windows Terminalist says:

    I own the .co.uk for my first intial plus my last name, and took the “Google, Google for everything” approach to hosting. Mostly just wanted the email address for giving out to potential employers, but it means I feel I ought to put something on the website more than the half-baked Blogger page (with approximately 1 post saying “so what does this button do?”) that’s currently there.

    Not sure what to put there, and couldn’t really figure out Google Sites terribly well. Suppose I could turn it into a landing page, but my Facebook/Twitter are both heavily locked down and also not something I really want to share. Don’t want to be one of those people posting “to the world” rather than to the people I know. Suppose I could try to put together a little personal homepage of some sort, but I don’t have much of a history or body of work to shout about.

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  9. StDoodle UNITED STATES Google Chrome Windows says:

    First name’s “Jason,” which was very popular in and around the year I was born. :(

    I keep trying to think of some short phrase that incorporates “Wood,” but nothing sounds exactly “professional.” *snicker*

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