In my view, your online identity is made up the handles people use on the Internet to get to the "real you".  In other words, a way for people to find and communicate with you without physically meeting you.  As we use the Internet we tend to build up a collection of handles to ourselves in the form of user profiles, email addresses, and search engine results that link back to us.  The sum of these handles comprises our online identity.

I believe that in 2007 a lot more attention will be paid to the value of our online identity.  This will take a number of forms including the Web sites that pop up when someone searches for you on Google, how much control you have over those Web sites, and how much control you have over your email address(es).  And last but not least, would it be possible for someone else to hijack your online identity by making alternate handles that they have created more publicly visible than the ones that you really want people to see?

Let me share some steps that I've taken in the past year to control my online identity and safeguard it so that I ultimately control it.  In the process I've learned some pretty cool tips and tricks that have made the Internet far more enjoyable for me to use.

Take Control of Your Online Presence

Ultimately there are two ways people will reach you on the Web:  One is by searching for you, probably using Google, and the other is by using handles such as your email address or your Web site that you've given to people on a business card or by word of mouth.  If you don't control those handles, the very first thing to do is to stop the hemorrhaging and take some cheap and simple steps to start controlling them.  Here's what I did:

1. Buy your own domain name.  This is the starting point, and something you'll probably keep forever.  Your Web site, your email address, and your search engine hits will all point here eventually.  It is important that you own this yourself so that nobody else can shut it down or point it somewhere else in the future.  You need to have your own site, otherwise your online identity is in the hands of MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, or wherever else you might currently be "living" online.  It's cheap, too.  You can buy a .com domain for only $7.95 a year from sites like GoDaddy, cheaper if you don't care about the .com extension.  This is really the only expense you need to incur in this entire exercise.  On a side note, having a domain name with the terms that you want to target (your name, in thise case) in it is one of the fundamental todo's in proper search engine optimization.
2. Set up email at your domain.  Extricate yourself from Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, or your company email address--at least for your personal communication.  For example, I use jason@jasonkolb.com.  You no longer have to deal with setting up an email client and configuring SMTP settings and techie things like that, you can now easily set up Web-based email that behaves identically to Gmail or Hotmail by using a free service such as Google Applications for Domains.
3. Set up a Web presence at your domain.  This is the key to controlling what people see when they search for your name.  You have a myriad of choices as to what to put here, the easiest being whatever comes with your email host (such as the Web hosting facilities that come with Google Applications for Domains or Microsoft Office Live, both of which make it easy to get a simple Web site up and running).  When you're ready to start adding some serious content to your site you can move to something like TypePad or Wordpress, or if you really want to do something slick you can use an open source content management application like Drupal or Joomla to put something completely customized together.  Hosting services often use Fantastico which makes installing and configuring these open source packages a trivial task.
4. One thing that I really enjoy is the added functionality that something like Google Applications for Domains can give you on your domain.  For example, my start page is now set to http://start.jasonkolb.com, my calendar lives at http://calendar.jasonkolb.com, and my inbox is at http://mail.jasonkolb.com.  My Jabber chat handle is jason@jasonkolb.com.  I get all of this for free, and I guarantee I'll never forget them, because they'll never change.

What's really cool is that I ultimately control what lives at all of those addresses.  If I decide that Google is too Evil for me, I'm free to switch at any time.  I can move to Microsoft, or pay a monthly fee to host everything on a shared server, and all of my email will keep flowing and my Web site address stays the same--I never run the risk of an address going stale.

Promote Your Online Presence

Now that you have your own domain and site, the next trick is to make sure that people end up there when they search for your name.  You could just leave a placeholder page on your Website, but that won't necessarily ensure that people end up there when they search for you, especially if you have a common name.  Why not do something more interesting and productive?  Here are some steps to make sure that you control the results that pop up when people Google your name:

1. Publish some actual content that will get linked to.  Even if it's not much content, if you can get people to link to the content, or if you leave links to it on other sites, it will rise up the search engine rankings.  The goal is to get it to the top, so the more links the better.
2. Use your site address on business cards and in forum and email signatures.  Not only will this build search engine juice, but it also firmly establishes your site as the center of your online identity.
3. Instead of filling in profile information on sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, forums, user groups, etc, simply post a link to a profile page that you host on your own site.  For example, my MySpace profile (which pretty much just collects dust) only contains a link to jasonkolb.com as far as content goes.  That way if you want to change the information you only have to change it one place, and you'll rest easy knowing there's no outdated information out there that you forgot to update.  This applies to resumes as well.
4. Google yourself regularly.  If you're not at the top of the results, you need more links.  If you have the bad luck to share your name with a celebrity, you're either going to have to create a LOT of content with your name in it, and a lot of inbound links to your site, or you'll have to settle for working on other keywords in combination with your name.

The sooner you get moving on this the better, because with every link to your MySpace or LinkedIn profile, you become more joined to that particular site.  Every time someone puts your Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, or company's email address in their contact list as their primary point of contact to you, that's one more inbound link that you ultimately have no control over.  And the more content you put on a site that you don't control, the more search engine juice you're giving that site and the harder it will be to eventually regain control of your name in search engine listings.  Better to start now than to be at the mercy of MySpace tomorrow.  If they decide to start charging you to be a member, it'll probably cost you a lot more in the long run than the $8 a year to own your own domain.  And you'll have a lot less geek cred as well :)

Keep Your Private Online Activity Private

One last aspect of protecting your online identity comes from a different angle.  Certain companies, like Google, have an incredibly powerful ability to track what you do on the Internet.  If you don't care, that's fine.  At least you're aware that you and your history can be exploited at some point.  However, if you have a problem with that, there are several steps you can take to keep your online activity private:

• Log out of your Google account when you search.  If you use personalized Google searches or the Google homepage, your searches are being tracked.  Just log out before you do any searches that you would rather not be tied to.
• Use an anonymous proxy.  If you're doing something that you REALLY don't want to be tied to, use a product like Anonymizer that will make it next to impossible to trace your activity back to you.  Using an anonymous proxy makes it extremely difficult to track information back to, so your ISP or anyone else who might be sniffing network traffic won't know where it comes from.

Of course, the classic argument against these techniques is "if you're not doing anything bad, why do you care?"  Well, I care because I don't want to be profiled.  I value my personality and I want to be the one who controls what other people do and do not know about me.  If a Google employee can peruse my search history and see every single thing I've ever looked for on the Net, they pretty much have access to my stream of consciousness and I'm just not cool with that.  In fact, they would probably be able to put together such a good personality profile of me that they may end up knowing things about me that I would be surprised to find out myself (as I've written about before).

Be sure to protect your online identity this year, and every year thereafter.  It's going to be with you for a long time.