Whats in a Name?

Today I had to make a few decisions on regards to my on line identity particularly that of a name. I joined several social networking sites such as Flickr, Linkedin, Delicious and Friendfeed and revisited some I had tried before such as blogger (obviously), twitter and wordpress.

The aim of the game was to try and come up with a name that could be used across all platforms in order to create a uniform on line identity. Making this task so much easier is a website called Namechk which checks your desired user name over 159 different social networking sites at the click of a button (Gosse and Edinborough 2011).

I chose to use my actual name rather than an avatar and the purpose of creating a multifaceted web presence was to not only try out different platforms but increase contacts with industry professionals. Unfortunately my common name only could only be used in full on one site while an abbreviated version had to be used on the rest.

A short tour around the sites gave me a brief indication of what each one does:

Linkedin - is a social networking site geared towards career progression, allowing you to keep in contact with and nurture relationships with industry professionals you have met throughout your working life. It also allows you to form and join groups in order to seek advice (What is Linkedin?  2011).

Flickr - Allows you share photographs between family and friends as well as publicly, I'm quite impressed the "commons" an area that displays images that are out of copyright. This would be a good resource for graphic designers (Welcome to Flickr  2011).

Delicious - not all about cakes as thought! This is a "social bookmarking site" which allows you categorise and then publish bookmarks and add comments (Getting Started  2011).

Friendfeed - allows you to "start conversations" and "share" web content with friends. Seems to me to be the same as facebook  (Why FriendFeed  2011)

Blogger and Wordpress - are both blogging websites

Twitter - is a micro blogging website, allows you to send short sweet messages with links to photos or urls.

 

Getting Started. 2011. http://delicious.com/help/getstarted (accessed 5/12/11).

 Gosse, D., and A. Edinborough. 2011. namechk. http://namechk.com/ (accessed 5/12/11).

  Welcome to Flickr. 2011. http://www.flickr.com/ (accessed 5/12/11).

  What is Linkedin? 2011. http://au.linkedin.com/static?key=what_is_linkedin&trk=hb_what (accessed 5/12/11).

  Why FriendFeed. 2011. http://friendfeed.com/ (accessed 5/12/11).