Thing 3 - Consider your personal brand

This one was interesting, and has made me think.

I Googled my name with the word 'librarian' and found the top hit was my Twitter feed - hadn't expected that. Then there's a page from our VLE and the rest are the primatologist author who shares my name. I fare better with just my name, since I already have my own website for photographs, for which I have my own domain.

I use Facebook, but all of my 'friends' are people I have actually met; I have made minimal information public; I don't have it indexed by Google. I follow people for work and leisure on Twitter; this blending of two worlds is one of the reasons I'm not fully confident with Twitter yet.

When setting up this blog I thought, for the time being at least, I would like to keep personal and professional separate, so would need a new identity. I thought for a good while about a blog name, and settled on 'three week loan' since it was something I associate with libraries and work rather than home, and I felt it was a little reminder that we still have books to lend, despite all the lovely new things technology brings! I am aware that some people will find my being anonymous off-putting, but I'm still just a little bit scared...I'm happy to get an online identity within the library world, and then perhaps meet other library people in the real world as a result. I'm not so sure, however, that I want someone I meet at party to learn my name and then find out all the same information.

The suggested links for this Thing gave some interesting reading (including by someone I once knew at university; small world). I found particularly interesting Danah Boyd's suggestion that 'stuff gets buried by repetitive blogging' so that 'old' information would only be found by those looking for it. I'm not sure if that's supposed to be comforting or not...