Your Online Profile

Are you the kind of person who posts embarrassing photos of yourself from last night's party? Do you write angry rants about your boss on Facebook? Or do you get into flame wars with other folks on message boards, all under the assumption that you remain anonymous?

This is an issue - the question of Internet anonymity - that people are only beginning to think about. Maybe they should be learning about their developing online profile from early on in life.

People use Google to do vanity searches. That is, they enter their own name in the Google search box to see what comes up. But the argument that this tendency indicates an ever growing narcissism in society misses a more important point. Other people are also Googling your name: your friends, a potential employer, even a new boy/girlfriend. People want to know as much about you as they can, and Google's online repository of information just might give these people what they need to know to decide if you are worth their time. It's an important thing to remember that whenever you spend time surfing the Web, you leave traces of your digital DNA everywhere you go.

Educator/blogger Will Richardson talks about the need for teachers to learn how to guide their students towards developing positive online profiles. This is a matter that I take seriously, especially given my future in the teaching profession; thus, I'm looking for the developing trends in online profiling.

Google, in fact, is making it a bit easier for people to have some control over the information that Googlers uncover when searching your name. The Google Profile will appear at the top of search listings when someone enters your name. Of course, other results will still appear, so you can't have complete control over the results. (Note: here's my profile)

Nevertheless, there are things that people can do to exercise a certain amount of influence over search results. Aside from the Google Profile, you can publish yourself as much as possible in blogs, social networking sites, or on YouTube. And when you do so, make sure that what you publish portrays you in a positive light. In my case, I've been making personal websites and blogs for the past eight years about my travels and other experiences. And when YouTube started to become popular, I created over two dozen short movies from old home video footage and posted these movies online. As more and more people have watched these videos, they have added their own opinions (generally positive) that contribute to my overall online profile. In fact, many of my videos have been embedded in other websites all over the world, which increases the number of search results (again, mostly positive) when someone Googles me.

If you have a common name, it may be hard for people to differentiate the search results. My name, Phil Schroeder, is common enough that a Google search turns up the following: a musician from Oakland, California; a Facebook profile for a namesake in Phoenix, Arizona; a minister in Georgia; and a recording artist from Rancho Cordova, California. And that's just on the first page of search results. There are some results for me, as well, but people specifically looking for me will have a busy time sorting through all the different people with my name.

However, I've been rather fortunate to have used my online handle, philseoul, since my earliest days on the Web. It's my email username, my blogging handle, and my YouTube profile name. Consequently, if I type 'philseoul' into the Google search box, I get almost exclusively relevant results. The first result is my YouTube channel. The second leads to my Twitter profile. The next unique result is my most recently added movie to YouTube. The next is a website that has aggregated my videos on an international site. Further down the first page is a link to a short review I posted on a recipe site back in 2003. At the bottom of page one is a link to my StumbleUpon profile. And relevant results keep on appearing (1160 total search results), the vast majority of which refer to my sprawling online presence.

Because of the success of finding search results under my handle, I have added 'philseoul' as a Google search term to my resume and email signature. I know that people are likely to Google me anyway, so this is my way of having them do it on my terms.