Mixed Reviews, Creating your Online Identity, and Follow-ups

Apparently, I have a couple of friends who cyberstalk me, particularly through this blog. (They're close friends, one of whom I've known for 20 years, so they have full cyberstalking rights.) But I got mixed reviews from them, in person, about my previous post about confidence/competence/self-assuredness. So I should ask my dear friends who cyberstalk me (you know who you are): While I do appreciate your comments in person as we're eating lunch, I have to ask, nay beg, even, that you post comments here, too. (Carol is very good at this. Thank you, Carol!)

AND this brings us to our next topic: Online Identity Creation.

Recently, I've been conducting informal research on how people present themselves online. While word-of-mouth is one way to build a reputation, another way is to deliberately shape online one's identity in whatever light one wishes to do so. For instance, someone who wants to find "Ana Krahmer" online, can pretty easily verify where I work, what I do in my job, and what topics of discussion interest me. But, out of all this information, in reality, the only thing that is verifiable is where I work because I'm listed in the staff directory there. My worlds sometimes merge, as I describe in the first paragraph, where a close friend will poke around my blog out of curiosity about what I'm discussing, but sometimes, I'll get an email inquiry about something I've discussed in the blog. But what I find interesting is, I have never received questions in email based off of the staff directory at work.

I don't really know what that says, beyond that you have to be very deliberate about what goes up online about yourself. Do you want to set out to establish yourself as a software developer? A system engineer? A graphic designer? Then make for darned sure that everything on the Internet that pertains to you relates, also, in some way to how you want your identity to be represented.

I mean, I don't care if people know that I consume any kind of book as some people consume candy, or that I can be a complete grammar snob, but these aren't things I'm really developing my online identity around. And, although I'm using myself as the example for this discussion, this topic arose from talking to another friend who has done a great job of professional self-promotion through his career interests; it's in fact a very skillful use of Web 2.0 and 3.0.