The Leisure Trail
Here's an interesting side-effect of Google Buzz, which I've been playing with for around a week. I started to re-think what I'm doing with feeds, extending reach, and how I appear in search. Today, I've gone into FriendFeed and narrowed the stream right down, removing half a dozen feeds, using the handy "remove entries" option.
I've been quite careful not to throw feeds into Buzz, not just to avoid replication, but also the fact that FriendFeed aggregated content was coming up high on search results for me. FriendFeed was full of evidence of the banal aspects of my online life - quite minor status updates, conversations which you had to be there to appreciate.
My reason for reducing this kind of information flow is straightforward. I have a relatively large internet footprint because I use the internet as a direct communication device. But, the things I want the rest of the world to focus on are not my social life, but my work. As more people come know about me first from my writing, seeking me online, if personal conversation is at the top of the search results, then I'm doing myself a disservice.
Do I want people who are looking for me online first finding my occasionally daft Twitter banter, or Facebook updates meant for family and close friends? No. Does this mean I've belatedly become conscious of the likelihood of people judging me on this micro-drivel and thereafter looking no further? Yes.
My contributions to the culture of online begin in 1994, and I have no fear of the WayBack Machine. Still, if I want a future in which the internet contributes to my prosperity then I probably ought to more closely guard my reputation. Not that I have been stupid or careless - but despite SEO snake-oil, we can't control what search engines decide is relevant. People spend years optimising websites to suit search algorithms. All it takes is a few tweaks of the search engine, and they have to start all over again.
Even my closed Twitter account, @deanwhitbread, showed up in a search - a Bing search, funnily enough, which seems to rank and feature things that Google demotes out of sight. Very briefly in 2008 I must have run the account publicly, because although I do not recall doing that, I found this site which has archived an entire 8 tweets from the account.
What recourse do I have to remove this content of mine? Little or none. Without throwing huge amounts of money around, it's hard enough chasing down blatant copyright infringements on text, video or audio, and it's practically impossible to prevent RSS feeds migrating into sites which have no respect for your content being yours when the beginning point for most internet users is "if I can see it or hear it, then it's mine".
From here on, then, I'm keeping my accounts locked down much more, especially the chatty ones, and I'm going to use RSS less. What's said in Facebook can stay in Facebook. What I do on YouTube can stay there unless I actively put it somewhere else. Whatever I tweet, blip, clip or fave can by default stay inside the services I use to carry out those actions. I will still use multiplying systems, but far more selectively.
It won't plug the leaks, but it will eventually mean that far more of my carefully constructed, substantial content is associated with me, rather than just my internet leisure trail.
