How to Clean Up Your Online Reputation

By Becky Worley | Upgrade Your Life – Wed, 14 Nov, 2012

The Internet knows a lot about you, maybe too much. So how do you clean up your online reputation and get control of your image to reflect who you are now — or how you want a prospective employer to perceive you?

A study from Microsoft Research indicates that 70% of online recruiters have nixed candidates because of search results that come up around their names. So your identity online is vital. We'll start with the tried and true ways to clean your rep and then move on to my sneakier methods.

Hide and Delete
First the basics: Delete questionable posts on all social networks — Twitter, old-school Myspace entries, and of course Facebook. And about Facebook — get your privacy settings locked down. To access the settings, click the drop down arrow in the top-right corner of your main Facebook page, then click Privacy Settings. At minimum, make sure your posts are only shared with friends. Then scroll down through all the settings and make sure what you watch, read, and listen to aren't publically searchable. If you've been tagged in anyone else's dicey pictures — untag, untag, untag. Click the picture, choose options and click "I want to untag myself."



Bury the Bad Stuff
That's all the stuff you can control, but what if there's info sprayed across the Internet that you can't remove, maybe you were busted for graffiti back in high school and it made the town paper? Or worse, what if someone went on a rant about you and it shows up when your name is entered into a search? There are certainly advocates who say you should write letters asking individuals or organizations to remove those postings, but in real life it's pretty useless. Instead, take solace from the fact that 97% of searchers never look beyond the first 3 pages of search results. If you can push the negative results down by posting positive or neutral information that's more current or has more appeal to search engines, you'll win the battle 97% of the time.

[Related: How (and Why) to Turn Off Socialcam]

Claim your Name
To create material that search engines will find, the first step is putting your name out there on high-traffic sites:

• Google: Google ranks its own sites higher than others, so create a Google Plus account, use the Google Dashboard to manage your profile, and create a Youtube channel all using your real name.
• LinkedIn: Create a LinkedIn profile, this is one of the most powerful tools you have in establishing your work reputation. LinkedIn is the de facto resume and job networking site for professionals these days.
• Yourrealname.com: This is the big one: buy the domain name for your real name. Then start a blog using one of the simple blog tools like WordPress or Blogger. You can either host your blog at that URL or build an independent site. I own beckyworley.com, and I have a site that reflects my current work, links to my social media pages, and houses my resume. I used Squarespace to build the site and it took me about a day to get it looking the way I wanted it to.

The Sneaky Stuff
Tweak your name. Any chance you can apply for a job using a slightly different form of your name? If you are Bob Smith with a slightly murky online reputation, applying for jobs as Robert Smith and representing yourself online as Robert going forward could help you distance yourself from that rascal "Bob."
Flood social sites. Go over to namechk.com, type in your real name (or your new professional name) and sign up for every social site you can, all those sites will boost the appearance of your name in search sites.
Use images to your advantage. Start a Flickr photo sharing site and write your name on all the (appropriate) pictures you post. Do the same with Instagram, Tumblr and photobucket.
Don't forget about the real world. Everything you do these days is archived online — volunteering for charities, PTA boards, 5K runs, seminars you attend.  If your college or high school has class notes, submit info. Write a well thought out letter to the editor, do an online genealogy for your family, attend county meetings where the names of attendants are published online. All these well-established sites get lots of search engine love.
Link Link Link. Once any of the above listings of your name appear online, link to them from your blog or website. It's the interlinking that gives you real search engine power.
You can of course hire a reputation service to do all of this for you, but if you have the time and want to save a few thousand dollars, these techniques can really help.
If you have successful tips about how you've sculpted your online reputation, head over to our Facebook page and share your ideas.

[Related: Are You Being Monitored at Work?



http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/blogs/upgrade-your-life/clean-online-reputation-135856619.html

The web never encourages us to slow down!

Not all distractions are bad. As most of us know, if we concentrate too intensively on a tough problem, we can get stuck in a mental rut. But if we let the problem sit unattended for a time, we often return to it with a fresh perspective and a burst of creativity. Research by the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis indicates that such breaks in our attention give our unconscious mind time to grapple with a problem, bringing to bear information and cognitive processes unavailable to conscious deliberation. We usually make better decisions, his experiments reveal, if we shift our attention away from a mental challenge for a time.

The constant distractedness that the net encourages—the state of being, to borrow a phrase from T S Eliot, “distracted from distraction by distraction” — is very different from the kind of temporary, purposeful diversion of our mind that refreshes our thinking. The cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively. Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again.

What we seem to be sacrificing in our surfing and searching is our capacity to engage in the quieter, attentive modes of thought that underpin contemplation, reflection and introspection. The web never encourages us to slow down. It keeps us in a state of perpetual mental locomotion. The rise of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, which pump out streams of brief messages, has only exacerbated the problem.


There’s nothing wrong with absorbing information quickly and in bits and pieces. We’ve always skimmed newspapers more than we’ve read them, and we routinely run our eyes over books and magazines to get the gist of a piece of writing and decide whether it warrants more thorough reading. The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively. What’s disturbing is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself — our preferred method of both learning and analysis. Dazzled by the net’s treasures, we have been blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture.


>> more at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/7967894/How-the-Internet-is-making-us-stupid.html

Blogging out of Balance

SEVERAL INDEPENDENT ASSESSMENTS HAVE REACHED IDENTICAL CONCLUSIONS: IN THE SCIENCE BLOGOSPHERE, MEN SIGNIFICANTLY OUTNUMBER WOMEN. IS THIS EVIDENCE OF DISCRIMINATION?


Could the disparity in numbers of bloggers be related to a difference in the underlying population of scientists? A recent report (PDF) by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) showed that in 2009, women received more PhDs than men in the U.S. But do those numbers hold for science PhDs as well?


While men do slightly outnumber women in science, math, and engineering PhDs, the disparity in numbers is much smaller than the disparity we see on the major blogging networks, including ResearchBlogging, where male bloggers outnumber female bloggers by over three to one in the same fields as the CGS report. 


Of course, even though women have nearly drawn equal with men in earning science PhDs, men still far outnumber women in tenured- and tenure-track positions. At MIT, for example, a 2006 report found no department with more than 30 percent women faculty, and just three of six with more than 20 percent women. Could this male dominance in the upper echelons of academe be discouraging women from blogging?
§ SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
>> more: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/blogging_out_of_balance/