@shareski has written about digital footprint vs presence. He has affirmed the need to wisely filter your content before you post or upload. He’s emphasized the permanent nature of digital content and underscores comments on other sites etc. His student Jamie recently blogged the topic and describes Googling her identity. So let’s test it out and read her blog. Jamie writes far better than I. http://eci831jamie.wordpress.com/2010/11/06/digital-tiptoeing-along/
With my name’s simplicity if I assume that my identity would be buried in a tsunami , I would be wrong. Among the thousands of Al Smith’s out there, I appeared in a blog record ranked #3- in a blog I’d assume to never be on query page 1! Also weird my next record was on page 3 from my My Linkedin account i rarely use. Says a lot about Google’s Page Rank-still don’t get it. With a query adding my hometown, Al Smith Kelowna, i found 10 solid hits on page one all of which were actually my content or a directory listing. What is strange for me is the irder. I cant always figure it out; however, my connection as a teacher was dominant. More reason to be careful what i post, especially because I sometimes ‘wanna rant!’
Anyway, I also appeared on 3 pages of hits before finding assorted business links or US President sites. Another interesting fact is the frequency of my comments on other sites ranking so high. So we all need to pause before we punch the enter key. I was a little surprised by the infrequency of Facebook and Twitter records. For technology reasons more than policy I reason, Google can’t crawl inside social networks servers?
Again thanks to Jamie and her professor Shareski for the reminder about our footprint.
LiterateOwl 