Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, Myspace, Blogger, WordPress, Flickr, Picasa and the list goes on. What this means for you is the embodiment of your digital identity. Combine this with Google, Bing, Wayback Machine and you have yourself a current and potentially a past view of your life as it exists in the online and real world.
The very thing that I am doing right now is putting down a footprint in the sand in my digital existence. It may be read by nobody, but ultimately it is available at any time current and future as a reference to what I have done.
When you apply for a job, many recruiters and HR departments take the step of “Googling” you to see what your digital identity looks like. What you write, take pictures of and blog about are quite often publicly available. If they aren’t now, then one simple security policy change by the hosting provider can make them so.
If at some time you choose to change the path you have taken by removing your blogs, posts and pictures it may prove impossible since many of those entities are cached and stored for much longer than you may wish to know.
The message here is simply this: Act online as you would anywhere where your reputation is at stake.