At the FOTE09 conference we heard a lot of common sense advice about our digital identities from Professor Shirley Williams from the University of Reading.  She talked about many of the ways our digital identity can represent us.

Our digital identity can work in our favour, allowing people to search for all the cool things that we’ve done such as conferences we’ve addressed, photographs we’ve taken, even allow people to find our online CV.

However a poorly managed digital identity could have repercussions for a very long time.

It seems that not everybody is worried about the kind of impression that things such as an email address can give, imagine if you were an employer receiving a job application from bob@Icantbebothered.com or pinkfluffybunnyknickers@hotmail.com, what would you think? OK so they’re made up e-mail addresses but they’re not far from real ones!

If you type your name into a search engine such as Google what do you find?  The chances are you’ll find a whole bunch of people with the same name as you, but you will almost certainly find references to yourself.  What do those references contain?  Is it all stuff that you don’t mind everybody reading?  Facebook and other social networking sites are in the news constantly for many reasons, people posting pictures of themselves doing silly things in their work uniforms, making comments about their colleagues or their boss and losing their jobs, in fact only this week a man wanted by the Authorities in the United States gave away his location on Facebook.

Sometimes you can appear “guilty” just by association, many things true or not can be gleaned from  other people’s social networking sites and by the pictures they post in their galleries.  I’m sure there are a lot of people who really wish their friends hadn’t posted pictures of the party last weekend.  Or perhaps they don’t even think of the consequences, once information is out in the cloud we call the Internet it’s more or less impossible to get rid of it.

I know the tone of this post is a bit gloomy for a Friday afternoon but it’s important that the good and bad sides of the digital world are presented fairly. I guess the conclusion to this entry is to go out into the digital world and have fun but think twice before posting anything online that could show you in a bad light now, or in the future.  Check the security of your accounts to limit the number of people who have open access to your private information and be careful who you make friends with… because in the social networking world your friends might not actually be your friends.