Managing Multiple Online Identities (PodCamp Ohio)

The first session at PodCamp Ohio that I attended was on managing multiple identities online, and was presented by Daniel Johnson, Jr.

We kicked off the session by going around the room introducing ourselves and telling what we wanted to get out of the session. We were running late, and I almost got out of it, (I HATE talking in front of people) but he came back to me. It was interesting hearing all the different ways people hoped to learn from this. For me, I was hoping to learn more about managing the huge number of sites I have a presence on.

Daniel gave some background on himself, including the fact he has a commute of 60 minutes each way, and that this is a great opportunity for him to consume new media. I could really relate with this. Being a technology consultant means that I am frequently on the road for hours a day. This is the only way I can keep up with the 12 podcasts I listen to.

We talked extensively about branding yourself online, and there was some interesting debate on this. Sometimes it isn't clear if you should grab your usual username on every service that ever comes out before someone else can, or leave it alone knowing you probably won't keep up with all the services.

At this point in the session we talked about how to really pull everything together. Daniel spoke about how he will associate an e-mail address with a specific service and domain. (service@domain.tld) This was an interesting concept to me and could be a good way to see traffic patterns. At one point I set up a Gmail account for all of my online subscriptions. I knew I was going to get spammed, and if it was all going to one account that I didn't *need* to check, I didn't care as much. I'm not sure it's feasible at this point to change how I do things. I'll have to think on that.

A service called Profilactic was brought up for social media aggregation and lifestreaming. I'm evaluating it now. It seems like a cool idea, but I'm really fighting with the Wordpress aspect of it.

Overall, this session was a nice opportunity for real interaction with everyone involved. We saw very different views from various attendees, which is to everyone's advantage.