Blogs for sharing thoughts (WordPress, Movabletype, Vox, Blogger), photo blogs for sharing pictures (Flickr, HQ23, Photobucket), video blogs for sharing videos (YouTube), music blogs for sharing you music preferences (Last FM, Pandora, Pure Volume), presence blogs for telling the world where you are and what you are doing (WAYN, Twitter, Dodgeball) and rather ironically professional blogs for casting a professional image onto the web (LinkedIn). Oh and the new raft of Mobile Blogging tools that make all of this nice and easy (if not cheap) from the palm of you hand (Moblog, Radar, Mozes).
If like me you ‘play’ with these things a lot, then like me you’ll find a self-erosion of privacy well underway. Is it possible to work in experience design and not bare your soul to the world?
No. Not really.
Identifying this set me to thinking about how things used to be prior to the explosion of community offerings and social networks and the point at which anonymity is desirable or not.
What occurs to me is that the boundaries between ’social me’ and ‘professional me’ have long since blurred. Colleagues know me by my web alter-ego ‘Snowbadger’ and I know them by other fantastic monickers such as ‘DrPig’, ‘ParisHasslehoff’, ‘SonicPixie’ and ‘Boomtish’.
Brilliant. Insights into people’s minds I could probably do without!
Which prompts the question when do I use Snowbadger and when do I use Warren Hutchinson? I started using Snowbadger on the basis that no-one else was using it and I hate the idea of being Warren29876.
ID continues to be an issue but that’s another posting, If you haven’t sniffed out the Open-ID project, then I suggest you protect you alter-ego now.
When it all started
It started with MSN Messenger and Email when we started having to reveal our personal email addresses in order to get connected to each other and chat with friends while at work. But this soon developed into a business tool and we needed to chat to colleagues as well as friends. The problem was we all had silly ‘call signs’ due to the registration issue. MSN messenger recognised this when it introduced the ‘business tab’ to the chat client which enabled you to have 2 identities on MSN but by then it was far too late, we were all exposed!
When I am meeting people that I don’t know, particularly when I’m interviewing for a role here at LBi, I try to create a rich picture by digging up some background information on them from various sources. I can get a professional take from Linked In, a personal take from Friends Reunited, see what music they are into at Last FM, check out their thoughts on a their blog (if they have one) and even look at their pictures on Flickr. All this without even running a Google search.
Weird or wise?
There have been lots of postings written about blogs being your new CV, but what about the other sharing properties?. A search for my name brings up my linked in profile, my Last.FM profile, some Tailwind postings, my book on Amazon and some other stuff.
Is this the new CV? This post thinks so. The idea of personal branding is old, but in this context new.
Is trying to remain anonymous a good or a bad thing? Would you be conspicuous in you absence on these things?
The prevalence of social networks and community sites is eroding our ability to keep ourselves to ourselves. In order to ‘take part’ you need to give a lot away and if you don’t play you could be conspicuous by your absence.
So anonymity Vs nymity (?) 
.
Current project example
We’re in the middle of a project for a client where this dichotomy is patently obvious. It’s a community around a professional discipline that has had active forums for some years now. It’s an established community based on old-skool tools. There are numerous professional resources available in this system and there is a lot of professional support that takes place within the forums. There have been marriages too, which any community worth its salt should be able to boast!
We’re looking for ways in which to make these active communities more real, more connected and create more ‘currency’ in the system so that people take part in a positive and conducive way.
But there is a paradox at hand. Members of this community want to share resources and artifacts that they have created but they don’t want to append their name through fear of failure, through the artifacts not being good enough. That said they do want recognition if the artifacts are deemed useful and are downloaded by the community. In essence they crave peer recognition but are scared of failure.
On the flip side, they use this network for significant amounts of personal support and often discuss their workplace issues with virtual friends. They have a strong desire to remain anonymous through fear of retribution. In their daily jobs they are quite isolated despite having many colleagues. It’s a solitary role at times where asking question about how to do something could be construed as failure.
The power of this social network has the ability to seed a cultural change for this profession making it okay to ask questions, gain support etc.
For me its a running example of the need to be ‘me’ but cast a professional guise at the same time.
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