Manage your online identity.

Just a quick reminder that the Internet Identity Workshop will be happening May 14-16 in Mountain View, CA.

May 14-16 in Mountainview at the Computer History Museum.
1401 North Shoreline Boulevard
Mountain View CA 94043

REGISTER HERE

It will be the same format as usual. We will do a 1/2 day of talks on May 14th starting around 1 and going to 5 with a social dinner to follow. We pick these talks about two weeks ahead of time to reflect the latest and new developments in the field. This format provides an ‘on ramp’ for newbies to orient to the Identity Community and a way others catch up on the latest developments.

Open Space will begin at 8:30 SHARP on May 15th. We will have a full day likely with Speed Geeking after lunch for interoperability and application demo’s. A social dinner will follow.

If you’re interested in online identity, working in online identity, or would just like to see the community in action, make sure to register and attend – we recommend it.

Today, I came across a few interesting posts about the value of your online identity. First is the Bokardo blog, which was riffing on a post entitled “The Blog is the New Resume.” Bokardo writes:

Your blog represents you.
Represent! Your blog is speaking for you…to folks who might not know anything about you. Is it saying the right thing? is it saying the same thing you would say if you met someone for the first time?

Your blog is serious business.
It has the power to completely sway someone’s opinion about you. It fulfills the needs of lurkers everywhere who Google you to see what kind of person you are. Show them your best. (if you’re looking for work this is extremely important

At ClaimID, we obviously think that your online presence is more than just your blog, but the essential point of the post is relevant – what is online about you is very important. Linking in the comments is a post from Chris Messina, which is novel because you can find Terrell in the comments talking about ClaimID (which was nothing more than some really bad Ruby code at the time.)

I’m sure many of you are familiar with this, but in case you aren’t, Google has posted a lengthy blog post about managing its search engine results.  If you’ve got something in Google that you’d like to fix (or, if you’d just like to set up a robots.txt file for your website), you might wish to check this article out.

The wonderful folks at American Public Media’s American RadioWorks are looking for ClaimID users to appear in an hourlong documentary about online identity and self-marketing. This is a great chance to tell your story about online identity, as I know many of you have thought about this entensively.

If you’d like to appear in this documentary, send me an email at fred@claimid.com. I’ll pass your information along to the producer, so make sure you include a way to get in touch. Thanks!!!

Program Description: Design of Desire

An hour-long radio documentary on consumerism including a look at the new importance of online self-marketing

Half of America’s online teens think the Internet has improved their relationships with their friends, according to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Young people say online identities, in particular, create a way for them to market themselves to their peers. They offer a place where teens can define themselves through bands, videos and photographs; some teens say the Internet frees them up to be more like their “true selves,” without worrying about how they look or are perceived in school.

As teens get older and apply for college admission or employment, online identities can be cast in a new light. American RadioWorks seeks individuals, roughly under the age of 35, for inclusion in a radio documentary. ARW is looking for those who have online identities (profiles, blogs, etc.) and who are using ClaimID. ARW prefers to start speaking with individuals before they begin using Claim ID, in order to follow them throughout their process of using the service.

American RadioWorks is the largest documentary unit in public radio. It creates documentaries, series projects, and investigative reports for the public radio system and the Internet. ARW is based at St. Paul, Minnesota, with staff journalists in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Calif., Boston. Mass., and Duluth, Minn. A full program archive can be found at www.americanradioworks.org.

Via Technorati, I found an excellent post on online reputation management posted to the Engtech blog.  Tim Nash has really thought through some areas of defining your own personal brand, something that I know a lot of ClaimID users find valuable.  He writes about ClaimID:

ClaimID is a simple site which at first glance looks like many other social bookmarking sites but is designed to help you protect your digital identity. It offers several services including acting as an OpenID server, listing your sites and providing you with a microformat hcard.

Each of these is useful. I use OpenID whenever possible to login into site and always use my account from ClaimID. This has two advantages: I only need to remember one password/username combination and my comments can be checked for authenticity, as I have verified my claimID against my domain. ClaimID also allows me to list my forum profiles so people can see which forums I am registered at and using which username. Finally, it lists posts such as this guest blog which I may have done. This is only the tip of the iceberg with ClaimID, but even these simple steps allow people to check that it was me who posted that comment about their mother!

The article is very useful – check it out.

In the past few months, we’ve been spending a lot of our time and energy on OpenID. While we love OpenID and think it is the future, most of you didn’t join ClaimID just because we provided OpenID. Our goal at ClaimID is to address the full picture of online identity, and we believe that your online identity starts with the links that are about you.

In the next few months, we’ll be walking through some of our pre-exsisting features, with a goal of letting more people know about them, and to provide a more robust documentation set for the features (killing two birds with one stone – brilliant!).

Today, we’re going to walk through “Link Status Checking.” The idea behind this feature is really simple – if there are links out there about you, you want to know when they change or go offline. For example – let’s say you’re pointing to a newspaper article, and that newspaper article disappears into the archives. You’d want to know about that and update your profile accordingly. Just as it is important to create a profile, it is important to know that your profile is up to date and valid. So we’ll do that work for you

How to enable link status checking:

To enable link status checking, edit your account settings, and enable the “Alert me if my claimed links go offline” option.

What it does:

Every day, our link status checking robot will go out and make sure all of your links are there. If they don’t show up for a period of time, we’ll send you an email that lets you know the link has gone offline. You can then take the appropriate action.

Example:

So here is an example of a link I pointed to where the hyperlink changed:

I had pointed to the Lyceum staff webpage, but that was moved. So ClaimID emailed me, let me know. I updated the link to point to the right location, silenced the alert, and my profile was back, as good as new. Of course I’m biased, but I think this is pretty cool. If employers are Googling you, you want to know what is out there about you, and what has gone offline.

Hope some of you give this feature a try. We’ll be highlighting more of these features in the upcoming weeks.