Chapter 7
Owning Your Online Presence Who are you, anyway? In the digital world, just as in the physical one, you are partly who others say you are. This is why you need to be at least one—and preferably the most prominent—of the voices talking about you. You can’t allow others to define who you are, or control the way you are perceived. This is especially true today for people in the public eye, but the more we do online the more it’ll be true for the rest of us, too. We’re moving into new territory here. We’ve previously discussed the value of joining online conversations. Now I want to recognize that those conversations may, in some respects, be about you and your ideas. You need to know what people may be saying about you or your work. And you need to respond when necessary, especially when you need to clarify or correct what someone has said. Being public in this increasingly public world means participating. It means recognizing that what you do online influences the way others see you. This goes under many names: reputation, brand, influence and the like. For our purposes I’ll call it “brand,” but I’m not using the word in a commercial or marketing sense; rather, it’s about how you appear to the world beyond your family and closest friends, and what you can do to be seen as you truly are. In this chapter, we’ll discuss why, and how, you should consider becoming what amounts to a publisher in your own right. I can almost see your eyebrows rising as you read this, but don’t worry. Remember, this is the Digital Age. You don’t have to buy printing presses, or put up big broadcast towers, or employ anyone. Publishing today is what we all do. The word carries historical freight, but it’s now an everyday act. What I’m getting at, however, is a crucial point: To the extent that it’s possible to do so, you should control the reference point for people who want to know more about you and your ideas. We’ll look at how you can create, own and operate that online touchpoint—call it a home base, above and beyond the blogging or tweeting you might do elsewhere—for 96 Mediactive who you are, and what you do. As always, look for much more detail about specific tools and techniques at the Mediactive website. Again, the basics:
- Whether you create your own media or not, you need to join the conversation when people are talking about you or your work.
- Creating media and joining conversations will get you only part of the way. You also need to create your own online home base, one that you truly control. Your Place If you go to dangillmor.com, you’ll find more about me, and by me, than you’re likely to care about. The point is, it’s all there. I’ve made that site my personal home base on the Web. You should consider doing something like it. Why would you want to do this? Because you need to present yourself online on at least one page or site that you control, where others can check you out—I call it a home base here but on my own page I call it my “anchor site.” The more we participate in online social life, and the more our offline doings are fodder for what others see, capture and say about us, the more we need to give people a way to read our own take on things, unfiltered. Please note: I’m absolutely not suggesting that you avoid social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Foursquare and any number of other services designed for communication and collaboration. I do advise caution when you use them, but they are now so ingrained into our digital culture that it would be crazy to stay away entirely; besides, you can learn a lot through participation. I have accounts at all of those and many other sites. I use several of them regularly, notably Twitter, but I make sure that what I say publicly on other sites is reflected on my own home base. This is usually possible, as I’ll explain below, because Twitter and many other services give you a fairly easy way to push what you create using them out to other places. There two basic ways to create your home base. The easy approach is to make a page, or collection of pages, using a free service. There are any number of sites that provide such services, including Google Sites and Tumblr. You might consider Blogger or WordPress.com, both of which offer profile pages among other parts of their free blogging services, enough for your needs. Dan Gillmor 97 Keep in mind, though, that such sites don’t provide these services just to be helpful. Just as with Flickr and YouTube, you’re putting your information into their databases, not yours. And you’re using their names to help promote yours. The more complex approach, which gives you greater flexibility, safety (in some ways) and authority, is to be your own publisher. I recommend it. Whichever way you go, what you put on your personal site is the most important thing. Let’s look at that first. I’m a Brand? Who we are, at least in a public sense, is the sum of what we do, what we say and what others say about us. You can’t control what others say. However, you can absolutely control what you do and say. Your presence can take many forms in a social-media world. It can be a Facebook page. It can be Flickr photos or YouTube video uploads. Or Twitter tweets. Or your own blog. Or several of these, and perhaps some of the many other options. As we’ll discuss in an upcoming chapter, you need to be—today, at least—somewhat careful of what you say and how you say it. But it’s more important that what you say reflects who you actually are, assuming you’re someone the rest of us should respect. Your personal brand matters a great deal in an era of rapid economic changes, because you may move from job to job, perhaps even creating your own, and even within a single company your career will evolve. A personal brand does not mean notoriety, though some people have made careers of being publicly outrageous. It does mean establishing a reputation, because part of being valuable is being known as more than a reliable cog in a system. Your Home Page: A Portal to You Whichever way you’ve decided to create your home base, the most critical thing is to make it worthwhile. Easy to say, right? Actually, it’s not so hard to do. What should go into your own home base? Many things, but a few are key. I advise including an About page, a blog and links to everything else you’re doing on the Web (or as many as you can link to). How the page looks matters, but the content is the most critical element. And, of course, you want to be found. 98 Mediactive My home page has a “static” blog post at the top—a post that holds its position no matter what new blog postings I may write. There, I briefly introduce myself and what I do, and I point to other relevant pages on the site, including a more detailed About page as well as my speaking calendar, contact information and, of course, the Mediactive site. I specifically ask readers to think of the site as “a portal to (almost) everything I’m doing, online and offline.” My blogging at dangillmor.com consists mostly of personal material, with some political, tech-related and other items as well that don’t fit neatly into my professional blogging. Surrounding my personal blog are links to, or full posts from, many of the places where I post things elsewhere on the Net. They include Twitter tweets, product and business reviews I’ve posted at Amazon and Yelp, my Dopplr travel calendar, Flickr photos and more. And, of course, there’s a link to the Amazon sales page for my last book. How can all this appear so neatly on my page? Because of RSS, which I described in Chapter 3; those sites let me create RSS feeds of the material I create on them, which I can then easily import into my site. How often should you update your home base? That’s entirely up to you. If you’re doing great stuff on Twitter or other sites that pour information into your home base, you may not need to do constant updates on your blog, but if this is the single place where you blog the most, I recommend updating it at least twice a week. Those updates may take the form of text postings, embedded videos, podcasts or just about anything else. Some of the best blogs, moreover, have lots of short posts with many links; remember that linking is one of the basic values of the Web. Whatever you create, you want it first of all to be worth your effort; even if you have only a few readers or viewers, you are the person whose critiques matter most in the end. None of what I’ve described is complicated, though I keep wishing for a service that would make it even easier to aggregate this “daily me” onto my page more easily. New services are springing up to help you do it on their sites—we’ll list them on the Mediactive site—and you can get most of this done if you use iGoogle, MyYahoo, NetVibes and several other big-name services. However you do this, you should remember that you’re never finished. For better or worse, your home base will always be a work in progress, because you are a work in progress. Dan Gillmor 99 About You Your About page is where you get to define who you are and what is at the core of your work and thoughts. If you are doing creative media, especially journalism, your About page should also be the place where you disclose anything that might be (or be perceived as) a conflict of interest, though of course you should also disclose that in any postings you make about relevant topics, as noted earlier. If you have a resume or CV, link to it from the About page, both as a downloadable PDF file and a Web-readable HTML file. If you give talks, consider posting your speaking calendar (for privacy and security reasons, some people don’t do this). You should always include a way for others to contact you. You can create a Web form for them to fill out, or you can provide an embedded email address and phone number, or you can do all of these things. You should also have a Contact link on your home page, and ideally on all pages via a menu at the top. I don’t change my About page very often, and you probably won’t, either. Minor tweaks, yes, but this isn’t the place for discussing every quarter-turn of the screw in your career or other goings-on. Define yourself here in the broadest terms. Blog the smaller stuff. Your Blog I’m not a blogging determinist. That is, I don’t see blogs as hammers and all problems as nails. But blogs are the best way, so far, to provide updates on what you’re doing and why. You may well have another, professional blog devoted to your vocation or work life. You may want to blog only in one place, mixing the professional and personal. These are individual decisions and depend on how you work and whether you want to mix the personal with everything else in a deep way. It’s even possible that you might want to create a purely personal blog somewhere other than your home-base site, if you’re worried that people might misunderstand who you are based on its contents. If you feel the need for that kind of content segregation, consider whether to make that other blog pseudonymous (something I don’t recommend but that is sometimes necessary). What you blog on your home site is less relevant than the way you do it. If you post items full of misspellings and grammatical errors, 100 Mediactive people will notice. Taking care matters. If your posts are tedious and selfcentered, people will notice that, too. Self-awareness also matters. As noted earlier, your update frequency is up to you. The only rule that matters: Do what feels right to you. When I comment at someone else’s site, especially if I’m challenging what they’ve said about me or my work, I try to post an item about it on my own blog. This works both ways. I’ve been embroiled in a few major disputes over the years, and when that happens I make sure to talk about the issues on my own site, and to point back to my own thoughts from the comments elsewhere. I strongly encourage opening your blog to comments. It’s possible that no one will ever comment, but if you don’t give people the opportunity to respond you are telling them you’re not really interested in what they have to say. That defeats the conversational nature of media and can reflect poorly on you. Most blogging software and services give you options for handling comments. I’ve set mine up so that I have to personally approve the first posting by anyone commenting for the first time; after that, they’re free to post. I also use anti-spam add-ons to my blogs, because the spammers love to pollute blog comments the way they try to ruin everything else they touch. Look and Feel I’m a fan of simplicity. If I can’t understand the purpose of a website at first glance, I’m not inclined to stick around, much less come back. This is where blogs have a big advantage over other kinds of software. They’re instantly recognizable for what they are, and modern blogging services offer a variety of ways to easily create sidebars and other ancillary material. The downside is that users tend to pick popular blog themes, which can make them feel less unique. A new wrinkle in the look-and-feel category is the rise of mobile technology: More and more people are looking at the world through small devices with small screens. Be sure to check out the way your site looks on a mobile phone. If it’s a gigantic mess, find a way to make it usable even on a small device. (See our online discussion of this at Mediactive.com.) Whatever you decide about how your site looks, remember that in the end your taste is your own. Do it your way. Dan Gillmor 101 Being Found If no one can find what you’ve said about yourself, you might as well not have said it. Which means that if search engines can’t find you, you might as well not exist. You should try to make your home-base site the first item on the first page of search results for your name, particularly in Google. This is not a matter of faking out the search companies—they look extremely askance at such attempts—but rather of providing them with the kind of information they need to recognize your page as the definitive item about you. This may be difficult if you have an extremely common name or share the same (or even a similar) name with a celebrity. But if you’re the John Smith who blogs about mobile phones and lives in Seattle, you should be able to be found by anyone who has the slightest idea of who they’re looking for. Commenting on other people’s sites typically won’t help get you into search rankings, though that shouldn’t stop you from doing it. The blog comment spammers have so polluted the system that most blogging software now tells search engines not to look at the links in comments. Because search is so important, the field of “search engine optimization” (SEO) has evolved into a huge and somewhat controversial business. At mediactive.com we’ll be creating a list of some reputable SEO sites and companies, as well as offering some specific tips on how to optimize your home base so people can find you. “YourSpace”—Owning Your Words In the late 1980s I signed up for an account at an online bulletinboard system called The WELL, short for Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link. The WELL was way ahead of its time in almost every way, but one in particular stands out even now. Users were greeted with this language: You own your own words. The context was primarily about responsibility, which we’ve discussed in earlier chapters and will return to in Chapter 9. But there was another context as well: literal ownership, that “no claims on your copyrights were being made by The WELL, and that you would be responsible for enforcing those rights.” There was a catch, though. Suppose the WELL went out of business. What would happened to my words? They’d disappear. 102 Mediactive Fast forward to 2009, when Facebook launched a feature that became immediately popular: It gave users a way to have URLs—Web addresses— that included their actual real names or recognizable words chosen by the users. I signed up, and my Facebook home page became http://www.facebook.com/dangillmor instead of the previous URL, which looked something like “http://www.facebook.com/234030i8234x2f.” I did the same over at Google for my home page there. And I made sure that on the other social networks and services I used the most, I grabbed the dangillmor name, if possible; it’s my username on Twitter and Skype, for example. There are a huge number of services available today, and I have every incentive to try for the dangillmor name at as many as possible. One reason is to avoid confusion or semi-forgery. I’m not especially worried that someone will take over my identity in this way, but there’s no reason to invite trouble. Moreover, new services have emerged that will help you—for a sometimes-substantial fee—nail down the username of your choice, assuming it isn’t already taken, at dozens or even hundreds of sites. But nailing down my own name raised a bigger question: Did I—do I—actually own my own name at on those services? The answer is an emphatic “No,” because in reality I don’t own the information I put into other people’s sites and services—and that information specifically includes the vanity URL I’m permitted to claim. This should be clear enough. But when Facebook expunged one of its users in 2008, the event set off a mini-firestorm among people who care about such things, prompting Daniel Solove to post this admonishment at the Concurring Opinions blog: (Y)ou exist on Facebook at the whim of Facebook. The Facebook dieties [sic] can zap your existence for reasons even more frivolous than those of the Greek gods. Facebook can banish you because you’re wearing a blue T-shirt in your photo, or because it selected you at random, or because you named your blog Above the Law rather than Below the Law. On the one hand, this rule seems uncontroversial. After all, it is Facebook’s website. They own their site, and they have the right to say who gets to use it and who doesn’t. But on the other hand, people put a lot of labor and work into their profiles on the site. It takes time and effort to build a network of friends, to upload data, to write and create one’s Dan Gillmor 103 profile. Locking people out of this seizes all their work from them. It’s like your employer locking you out of your office and not letting you take your things. Perhaps at the very least banished people should be able to reclaim the content of their profiles. But what about all their “friends” on the network? People spend a lot of time building connections, and they can’t readily transplant their entire network of friends elsewhere. Since this incident, Facebook has opened up the user information in several ways, including letting users access their basic feeds from other websites and desktop applications, but only in specific ways that adhere to Facebook’s strict rules. Facebook still controls the information, though it graciously (ahem) allows you to download what you’ve created there. So the reality is still this: It is Facebook’s site, and they have every right to enforce their own rules, whether wise or ridiculous. Due process? It’s not a judicial system, and we shouldn’t treat or even imagine it that way. The real issue is why users put so much of their own lives up on the site. Most, I suspect, have no idea that what they post is only partly their own, if at all. As with so many other services people use on today’s Web, they may find out the hard way down the road. It’s the risk we take when we make ourselves subject to the whims of little gods. Mastering Your Domain To the extent that such things are ownable, I own the Internet domain dangillmor.com. (I also own gillmor.com and a bunch of other domains including Mediactive.com, the website that hosts this project.) What’s a domain? It’s your address on the Internet. Actually, it’s a translation from a series of numbers—dangillmor.com is actually 207.58.180.217—that computers recognize via a series of cooperative agreements that have been established over the years. Without the Domain Name System, or DNS, the Net wouldn’t work. You don’t need to care much about that. All you need to do is find a registrar: a company that registers your preferred domain name for an annual fee. Registrars abound, including big companies like Yahoo! that offer registration as one of many products, big registrars like Network Solutions and smaller firms like Tucows’ Hover.com service. As with all kinds of businesses, cheap is not always synonymous with good. Several registrars have gone out of business in recent years, causing major 104 Mediactive headaches for their customers. Wikipedia offers a list of widely used registrars. What’s the best domain name? Your own name, for most people. If you can get the domain that goes FirstnameLastname.com, you should. If you have an uncommonly spelled name, there’s a very good chance you can get it. If it’s a common name, that’s harder, but you can try for a .net or .org domain, or one of many others in the marketplace. But you may want an entirely different kind of domain name, one that reflects a particular interest. How can you find a good one? Contrary to popular belief, all the good domains are not already taken. True, I got gillmor.com back in the early days of the Web (and stupidly didn’t nail down others that turned out to be valuable, because I lacked the imagination to realize what a marketplace domain names would become). But in 2008, when I was looking for a good domain name for the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, the name startupmedia.org was available. I’m agnostic about whether you need to be a dot-com—that is, have an address that ends with “.com”—or whether it’s just as good to use .org (typically for non-profits), .net or another so-called “top-level” domain. There are all kinds of these available now, including .me, aimed at personal sites. For now I’d suggest sticking with the major ones. (I’d avoid .info, which seems to be a spammer favorite.) If you have an idea for a domain, the easiest way to see if it’s already taken is to visit the registrar and attempt to obtain it. You’ll know immediately if someone else has it. Some registrars offer suggestions, including related names. But my favorite way to come up with a domain name is to use one of the clever Web services that let you play with words and names, mixing and matching until you’ve discovered something that works. One of my favorites is NameStation.com, which lets you play with a variety of combinations until you find something you like, and also checks its availability. Hosting Once you have a domain, you have to decide where to host it. This means finding a service that provides servers and bandwidth. Many registrars do both, and this is certainly the simplest way to go. There are hundreds of hosting companies to choose from; the key is to find one that meets your needs and offers the best combination of price, reliability and service. As with registrars, your options range from companies like Dan Gillmor 105 Yahoo! to boutique services like the one I use, where, again, I know and trust the owner. A good hosting company will give you easy ways to create your site on its servers. My hosting company, for example, will set up a WordPress blog for me, and gives me online tools that let me create sites using Drupal and many other, more flexible content-management systems (CMSs). You’ll also get email services when you sign up with one of these companies. This has its own value. Rather than using the email from the Internet Service Provider where I live, I get my mail at dangillmor.com— a domain that stays with me even if I move and change ISPs. Of course, services like Gmail and Yahoo! mail also offer this portability, but I’d rather keep my mail archives (the messages I choose to save, far from all of them) on my computers than on someone else’s. Hosting may sound like a pain. And to some degree it can be. You may not need to get complicated in any way, though, if you just want to create a simple home base using platform-specific software. For example, you could start a blog at WordPress.com, which offers hosted blogging services and gives you excellent flexibility in terms of the look and feel, though you can customize even more if you have your own WordPress (or other CMS) installation. Then, when you’ve created your blog, you can point it—for a fee—to your personal domain. Outsiders who go to your domain address will see the blog, which is hosted by WordPress, but they’ll see it as part of your own domain. If you do this, be sure to get a backup drive that backs up all of your data on a regular basis. Information Safety I just emailed this chapter to myself. Call me paranoid or merely careful, but I’ve become an advocate of relentless, systematic backups of data. And when I post on other peoples sites, I look for ways to take out what I’ve put in. Backing Up If you don’t back up your data, you are a fool. Sorry to be so blunt, but I don’t offer this as nice-to-do advice. My practice is fairly simple. I “clone” the hard drive of my computer—i.e., make an exact copy—once a week. Every day, I back up my current work files. I email my chapter drafts to myself. And I’m looking into the online backup services—saving work into what people 106 Mediactive call “the cloud”—that are gaining popularity among the technocogniscenti. Even with this regime, I still end up losing things, most typically when a word-processing program—yes, Microsoft, I’m talking about you—crashes in the middle of a chapter and somehow the changes I thought I’d saved go missing. This doesn’t happen very often, but it’s annoying and part of the process. One way to have this happen less is to compose more of your drafts online, via services like Google Documents. The risk of putting everything into the cloud is that sometimes even companies you expect to be reliable lose things. (A Microsoft-owned mobile data service, appropriately called Danger, had just such an issue in mid-2009.) We did some of the editing of this book in Google Documents with no mishap, but I was careful to download the Mediactive Book folder frequently, just in case. Your blog and other home-base material is almost certainly living in the cloud. You should check with your hosting provider to ensure that it’s performing regular backups. WordPress, Drupal and other packages offer options to make backups of the data, on the server or downloadable to your own computer. My former employer deleted my entire archive of blog postings— not just once, but twice. The first time, around 2001, was because of a platform change combined with the company’s misguided understanding of what the Web was about; removing history struck me as perverse and still does. The second time was after I left Knight Ridder in 2005; the reason given was that it would be too costly to keep running the server—something that again struck me as bizarre. But they had the right to delete it, even if I though they were doing a dramatically wrong thing. In 2009, we got a lot of it back, and we have restored most of the old Knight Ridder blog to a site at Bayosphere.com (that’s another story, which I won’t tell here, but you can read it at the site). What prompted the project was the Web-sleuthing of blog historian Rudolf Ammann, who used the wonderful Internet Archive to locate many of the earliest posts. This made me wonder if it might be possible to resurrect a lot more or even most of what had gone missing. Pete Kaminski, a friend and technical whiz, took on the task. He’s done an incredible job of spidering, scraping, parsing and otherwise pulling as much as possibleout of the Archive. We’re not nearly done. We’re looking for more of the EJournal, of course—dozens or perhaps hundreds of posts are still missing, and may be gone for good. Dan Gillmor 107 I learned a big lesson from this experience. I no longer rely entirely on the good graces of other people, including employers, to preserve what I’ve created, much less keep it available for you to see. I try to rely on myself. Portable Data When you start a blog at WordPress.com, you’ll discover something wonderful, should you dig deep enough into the system settings: You can take it with you if you decide to leave. WordPress offers a backup system that includes a way to email the entire database of content to yourself at regular intervals, and the open-source WordPress community has written many plug-ins to make this and similar processes easy and robust. Even when you can readily get your data out of a site or service, that doesn’t mean you’re home free. Downloading the WordPress database is only the first step if you want to move it into another blogging software system. It can be done, but it’s not always easy. The WordPress community is serious about this issue, though, and it’s offering support to a movement that is gaining strength in this era of multiple sites and services where we post words, pictures, videos and more. The movement wants to make our data portable, so that we aren’t locked into someone else’s system or method of doing things. In general, when you’re using other people’s services you should always look for evidence that you can get out what you’ve put in. You should also keep copies of pictures and videos you upload. Owning Your Honor We have no idea yet what it means for mostly private citizens to live semi-public lives in the Digital Age. We’ll be figuring this out for years, even decades, to come. But we do know that we have to define ourselves, or risk having others define us. They’ll do so in any event, but if we don’t make our own case for who we are, we’re missing an opportunity.