Lee McKusick

So I realized today that most of my current Internet presence revolves around the username leemckusick; Twitter, Mahalo, Flickr, Gmail, etc. And I went to my del.icio.us bookmarks, or tried to anyway, but when I had first made it, it was still on the username gathrawn (Short for Grand Admiral Thrawn, the greatest Star Wars character ever). So I’m currently in the process of rebookmarking my links (there’s only 60, it’s not too bad) for the newly-created leemckusick account. And it hit me,

Is it really necessary to maintain a consistent Internet presence?

I think it is. In this day and age, people look you up on the Internet for a multitude of reasons. Businesses look up information before hiring you, boyfriends/girlfriends will probably google you to make sure you’re not a psycho or something; your presence in cyberspace can and will mean a lot to a lot of people. In fact, I’d say that unless you’re a senior (nothing against older people, but it’s generally true), you’re expected to be in cyberspace and having no presence there is likely worse than a bad one.

And this idea of having a consistent name across cyberspace is reinforced by this importance. In real space, you generally keep a consistent name. Granted there can be some variation due to the level of informality, i.e. Johnny to your friends vs. John at work, but your name’s still John and not something completely different like Rob or David. Keeping a consistent name much more easily facilitates the linking of the various aspects of your cyber-persona.

Of course, there’s the obstacle that the John Smiths and the Sue Joneses of the world face: common names. Heck, even the first two results for a google search of “lee mckusick” aren’t me! (Ironically, Yahoo gets it right, and even digs back to my days when I wrote the minutes for a couple of student government meetings when the secretary was out. Yahoo!). Looks like I need to do some more research into SEO (search engine optimization)…

But bottom line:

Yes, in this age of Google and social computing, it’s important to maintain a consistent Internet presence.

So now I’ll return to transferring my del.icio.us bookmarks. Plus, I get the advantage of tagging them [more] correctly this time…