Why You Need To Keep Your (Online) Nose Clean
I had a lunchtime meeting at a cafe yesterday with a fellow I’ve done a little work for. We were chatting about us doing a little more work for him.
One thing that became clear throughout the meeting was that this fellow knew an enormous amount about me, about this business and about the work we’ve done. And the reason was simple – he’d read a lot of this site.
And with a blog that’s been going for 3 1/2 years+ there is a heap of information here.
A Girl At A Football Match
Earlier in the year I met a woman at a football match and had a chat. She emailed me the next day to say “I didn’t realise you were famous!”
Mmmmmm 
)
A Referred Professional
A friend just referred me a service provider for a project we’re doing – the first thing I did was do a search for this person and see what I could find out.
That’s what a lot of people do – boyfriends, girlfriends, employers, businesses, etc.
It’s very important that you manage your online identity – and by that I mean everything that is online regarding you – very, very carefully.
Because the odds are that someone will find it. Maybe not now, maybe not next year………..but remember that it could well be there forever.
Cheers
Brendon
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
No “Could be there forever” about it! Thanks to archiving services like the Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org) and the Google Cache, pretty much anything you put online will always be accessible to others, even years later when you’ve forgotten all about it.
My partner was doing a search for her name the other day and one of the first things listed on page 1 was some posts to a discussion group we had made when we first went online in 1996.
I lost a webdesign contract once because the client found out my username on the Sitepoint forums and found all my posts. I had registered back there when I was just a newbie, so he found all my (2 year old) newbie questions I posted, and got the impression I was still a newbie and cancelled the project!