If you are anything like me, you have signed up to more sites than you can keep track of. With numerous networks, profiles, and tools scattered all over the web, I started to get the feeling that my presence online was becoming increasingly dilute and cluttered. In this series of posts, I’m going to take you through a process of online consolidation in an attempt to de-clutter my online life. This is a personal experiment so the results are still unknown, but you are more than welcome to follow along and share your experiences as we go.
Why De-Clutter:
There are a number of reasons you may want to re-think a cluttered online presence. Gone are the days when your online persona is considered of secondary importance. It is now widely accepted that friends, future/ex partners, parents and even current/future employers (and employees) have unfettered access to every aspect of your online life. This begs the obvious question, “What does my online profile say about me?”
If you can answer that question quickly and concisely then you can stop reading now, safe in the knowledge that you are on your way to achieving great things. Better yet, you can contact me and help me out. I’d love to hear from you. However, if you find yourself pausing for thought and asking yourself, “Which online profile?” then this series is for you.
Over the years many of us have built up multiple profiles on the web, each one a piece of an increasingly large jigsaw. Each individual piece doesn’t say much, but taken together these pieces are revealing an increasingly detailed personal (and professional) picture about each and every one of us. But, unlike a jigsaw, each of these pieces requires continuous maintenance and attention if it is to remain current and accurate. This is my first reason for wanting to de-clutter and consolidate my online presence: A diluted online presence packs less of a punch.
The second reason for this experiment is that an out of date and inaccurate profile is worse than no profile at all. It is worth thinking about this. Go back through your archives (you do keep archives don’t you) and pull out a CV from 3 years ago. Then consider using it to apply for your next job. Not only would you be short-selling yourself, but the big gap between the last entry and now is sure to arouse suspicion. The same is true for an online profile.
The Aim:
So what do I hope to achieve by de-cluttering my online life. At the end of this series, I hope to have a single online profile. All information available about me will be maintained (or mastered) in a single location. I will not have to update information in multiple locations and, conversely, anyone who is interested will be able to locate a concise, but more importantly consistent, profile across the web.
I do of course recognise that it may not be possible to achieve all of these aims, but without aiming high, I’m never going to be able to fully explore the full possibilities for online consolidation. These aims will act as a set of guiding principles behind the consolidation process.
The Process:
To start with, I wanted to build up a picture of just where I maintained online profiles on the web. To do this I fired up FreeMind and started listing sites I used on a regular basis. The list was surprisingly long, but I knew it wasn’t complete. I trawled through my password manager, browser history and bookmarks adding each new site to the mind map. Remember to only list sites where you maintain some form of web-profile. You should end up with a mind map looking something like this.
I still get the feeling that this list is not complete so I am going to perform several further passes to see what other profiles I have created online. I suggest you do the same as the picture might surprise you. In the next article, we will take this map and look at how we can begin the process of de-cluttering.
Photo Credit: hadsie [flickr.com]