GigaOM » Collaboration

The Indie Web: Who owns your identity?

Dawn Foster — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:02:19 +0000

Our online presence defines much of our identity both personally and professionally, especially for web workers. Now, I challenge you to think about how much of this personal identity you actually own and control. Do you have your own domain, or do you use something like Blogger or Tumblr? Do you manage your own software in a hosting account where you control all of the files? Do you use social networking tools, like Facebook and Twitter, as a key piece of your online identity? What would you do if any of these sites went down or your account was deleted for some reason, and how would that impact your identity? How much of your online identity is controlled by someone else? I spent most of the last weekend in June discussing these and other issues with a group of geeks in Portland, Oregon at IndieWebCamp organized by Tantek Çelik, Aaron Parecki and Amber Case.

The Indie Web movement is primarily about ownership and control over your identity. The difficulty is that many of the tools that we need to achieve the complete vision of data ownership just don’t exist yet, or they exist, but not in a way that is accessible to most people. During IndieWebCamp, we focused on discussing these current issues and starting to build some of the tools necessary to make the Indie Web a reality for regular people.

A few things to know:

The Indie Web is an emerging concept and a process that is taking time to evolve as we debate the right solutions.
There are varying degrees of how “indie” you want to be. For example, do you host your own servers in your garage or do you rely on a hosting provider?
There are many trade-offs to be made between how much time you want to spend on your identity and how much control you want to maintain over the long term. Your technical skills also play a role in how much you are willing or able to do.

Start now

Here are a few things that you can do now to gain better control over your own data:

Own your domain. The first step is to purchase and own your own domain name where you will build your online identity. If you aren’t ready to take the next step of hosting your own website software, you can start by redirecting your domain name to where you currently have your website.
Use your domain for email. While some take the extra step of hosting their own email server, I’m OK with having my email managed by Google , but using my domain. If Google decided to shut my email down for some reason, I can always spin it right back up with a different email provider because I control the domain name.
Host your own blog or website on that domain. Get some space on a server where you can install your own software and have control over your environment and ownership of your data. This has become much easier recently with one-click installs at many hosting providers where they can help install and upgrade your software if needed, so this doesn’t take as many technical skills to manage as it did a few years ago.

The future of the Indie Web

People are working now on tools that can take this a few steps further:

Keep copies. When you post to social networking sites, keep copies of those posts on your website or archive them in some way to reference later. You can get some of this functionality using APIs or tools like ThinkUp. This may act as a bridge while we finish implementing the tools to needed to fully realize the IndieWeb vision.
Syndicate to social networking sites. Ultimately, we want to be able to post everything to our website to have ownership of the original content while syndicating it out to other websites. The tools to do this are starting to emerge, but most are still work in progress and not ready for regular users to implement. Examples include the custom platform that Çelik has built to run his website and syndicate content to other services, and Will Norris’ Snowflake plugin that syndicates his short posts to Twitter. Both are good examples of the “post then syndicate” model, but neither are quite ready for regular users to deploy.

These are just a few of the many projects that aim to illustrate the Indie Web idea to get people thinking more about ownership and control of identity. It’s up to us to build the tools required to fully implement this vision.

Photo used courtesy of Aaron Parecki.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Branding Dilemma: When to Use Your Own Name

Amber Singleton Riviere — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:00:42 +0000

Making the choice between promoting your business using your own name or that of a company is a very personal decision that sometimes takes a lot of consideration.

The most common option is to brand yourself under a company, which works well when your company name is unique, brandable and broad enough to encompass a variety of products and services. This option works well for technology companies, for example, like Google and Apple.

Another option is to brand yourself under your own name. This is the way I ultimately decided to brand myself, but coming to that conclusion wasn’t quick or easy.

How It Works For Me

In years past, I tried to identify and promote each of my business ventures individually, but more recently, I asked myself what my main mission was for my work and business. I was able to succinctly say that my goal was to be a resource for small business owners and entrepreneurs. Once I realized that I had that one central objective, I saw that it really served as an umbrella for all that I do.

All of my work in some way supports small business owners and entrepreneurs. I have one site that provides articles and podcasts on issues related to small business owners, as well as products and services to help them along their way. I have a radio show that covers topics relevant to this same group, as well as a web design company that serves, for the most part, solo entrepreneurs. And, of course, I write for sites like this one on topics relevant to the group.

That unifying thread of serving small business owners and the entrepreneurial crowd shows itself in everything that I do, and usually, clients who work with me through one of my sites end up working with or following me through one or more of the others, so I decided to simply introduce myself under my own name. I changed my email signature, Twitter handle, Posterous handle, etc. to my personal name (or a shorter version of it), and now, when I introduce myself, my business card points people to my main web site (the domain is my name), which then links them to any of my business ventures that fall under the umbrella of what I do.

Instead of trying to wrap my mind around all the different products, companies, or spin-off sites that I develop, which will likely be an ever-growing and changing list, I now focus on thinking about what I personally want to represent and be known for: helping small business owners and entrepreneurs through a variety of resources, products, and services. People start with knowing me and what I do and then figure out which of the sites under that umbrella might help them.

Other Successful Examples

Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, and Gary Vaynerchuk are examples of successful entrepreneurs who identify themselves by their own names rather than those of their companies. They each have two or more sites, books, or companies underneath them and are considered experts in a particular area or niche. Seth Godin is known for marketing, Chris Brogan for social networking, and Gary Vaynerchuk for parlaying passion into business. Their followers know the niche that they serve, and they know them by their individual names first then that of their companies or products.

Michael Port is another example. He has his main, personally-branded site, MichaelPort.com, which directs visitors to any of his books and programs. People know him as a marketing expert, or maybe as the “book yourself solid” guy. They don’t necessarily remember every one of his books or products, but they know him and his name, and they know what he represents.

When to Go With Your Name

I think that if there’s even a remote chance you’ll start another business, sell your current one, or change directions, it’s probably better to go with your name over that of your company. This option works well for entrepreneurs and writers especially. If you think that you’ll start spin-off companies, products, or services and want to be known as an expert on a particular topic, then going with your name might be the easier choice when it comes to branding and promotion.

For me, it’s been much easier to promote myself, definitely, but I’ll also say that it seems to be a lot easier for new contacts to wrap their mind around what I do as well. They immediately see that I do a variety of things, all geared to help them as small business owners. It has made things easier to manage, and I’m much more confident in my marketing efforts as a result.

How do you promote yourself, as your name or that of your company? What made you decide to go that way?

Photo by Flickr user Frogman!, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Chi.mp: An Ambitious Content and Identity Management Platform

Darrell Etherington — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:00:31 +0000

Despite my best efforts, I can easily get lost on the web. And in doing so, I let some things fall into neglect, like social network identities that I should tend to, or blog content that I should update. It would be really great if I could keep everything in one place. There are sites that try to aggregate these kinds of things for you so that you don’t lose track of them, but I haven’t yet found one that was comprehensive and simple enough to prove useful on a continuing basis. Chi.mp is a new identity management service that looks like it will provide a solution.

Chi.mp gives you a web site to consolidate your contact info and blog/social network content in one convenient location, at a unique URL within the “.mp” top-level domain. It’s a new service, and they’ve only just opened up registration, so you might still be able to sign up and get “yourname.mp” (I snagged darrelletherington.mp). It also serves as an OpenID provider, so you can use your Chi.mp account to sign into other sites that use OpenID. A free domain including a site that requires no HTML knowledge struck me as a fairly attractive package.

Your Chi.mp site is divided into “Profile Items” and “Content Items.” Under the Profile Items tab, you can enter contact information, employment history, education details and more biographical information. Think of it as a plug-and-play web-based CV, complete with links to our work online and an integrated portfolio.

In your Content Items, you can import contacts, updates and other info from a number of popular web services. You can also publish status updates to Facebook and Twitter from directly within Chi.mp, and choose to display your Twitter stream on your profile. All together, thanks to Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Hotmail support, most people should be able to aggregate a fairly comprehensive address book through Chi.mp with little trouble. Unfortunately, it’s missing the option to import contacts from Facebook, which would make it a lot more useful.

All of your imported contacts are stored in your “Ultimate Black Book” located under your Contacts tab. You can add new contacts and edit existing contacts from this page as well. You can also tag contacts for easy searching and grouping, and merge the duplicates that are bound to occur if you’re importing from a variety of address books. Chi.mp helpfully auto-detects duplicate contacts.

Like Facebook, Chi.mp offers you the ability to control the level of access people have to your profile. It does so through “Personas,” which are divided in to three categories. You have “Public,” “Work” and “Friends” Personas, each of which can be customized completely according to your taste.

Aside from integrating many outside services, Chi.mp also offers its own blogging and photo uploading features. These are very nice features to have if you’d like your Chi.mp profile ito be the go-to spot for all your online activity. Chi.mp’s blogging service is rudimentary, but completely adequate for most people’s usage. It works like Posterous and other mini-blogging services, giving you just the basics without the non-essential frills of more complete blogging systems.

In addition to offering customizable content and service integration, Chi.mp also gives you some control over your site’s look and feel. Design options include the ability to choose from a number of pre-set themes, and you can even design your own (limited) theme from scratch if you feel so inclined. You can also add your very own favicon, which many comparable services don’t allow.

It’s a very impressive service overall, and clearly designed to be completely user-oriented. You can even export your entire site with the click of a button, which includes your contacts as a vCard file, your blog posts as HTML, and more. Best of all, it’s completely free. Web workers could definitely do much worse for a comprehensive identity management platform.

What do you use for online identity management?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Make Yourself a Resource: Adding Value to Your Blog

Darrell Etherington — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:34:13 +0000

For many web workers, the central hub from which they manage their online identity and portfolio is, or features, a blog. Using a blog to represent yourself has many purposes, including acting as a C.V., establishing your identity as an authority in your field, and providing a launchpad for your various social network profiles.

Those are all very good uses, and benefit you as a web worker immensely. The only question I have as a visitor is, how do they benefit me? Yes, they help if I’m considering you as a prospective contractor for a job, but if I’m not, then the site quickly loses relevance. A blog should be doing work all the time, even when it isn’t speaking directly to your professional history and identity. Here’s how to make sure it is.

Keep ‘Em Coming

The best way to make sure a blog is doing work for you is to make sure that it will attract repeat visitors, even if those visitors aren’t currently interested in you professionally, since they may be at some later date. How do you get people to come back? Make sure they see your site as a growing, live resource.

Be a Research Assistant

The only way to do this is to make sure that you show them you can provide the information your visitors are looking for easier, quicker, and better than they can find it themselves. That doesn’t mean replicating Google search results. That means pre-searching, collecting, and annotating useful links and resources, and keeping them up to date. Case in point, if I’m looking for Twitter resources, I don’t go to Google, I go to TwiTip.com first.

Make link collections easy to find and clearly titled, possibly placing permalinks to relevant posts in your blog’s sidebar or header. Context and a human touch is especially important with these, since otherwise visitors will mistrust them as the products of automated web spiders and bots.

Humanize, Humanize, Humanize

That brings me to my next point, which is that you should make your blog as human as possible without being overly personal. I would avoid ads unless your blog is your primary source of income, or limit them to a very few which redirect to relevant sites to which you personally contribute or with which you’re involved.

The tone and content of your writing shouldn’t be too formal. The potential clients you want reading your blog probably spend a good chunk of their day reading formal business writing, press releases, etc., and your blog will fall off their radar if it comes across as too similar to those things. In the end, people are looking to connect with other people, not with dry instructional manuals.

Don’t Become a One-Trick Pony

Specialization is important. People respect specialists and look to them for solutions to pressing problems. That said, while there is nothing wrong with showing off your specialization on your blog, don’t make it the exclusive focus. You risk alienating everyone in your audience, and it will be especially hard to encourage repeat visits from casual readers.

It’s also important to show readers that you are not living inside a bubble. Web workers are prized for their ability to come up with non-linear solutions and adapt. That flexibility of mind will come across if you show a willingness to step outside your comfort zone once in a while and address different topics.

Get Beyond the “You” in Your Blog

Of course, since it represents you, it should primarily feature your content. That’s primarily, not exclusively. Having guest bloggers contribute content to your blog not only encourages an influx of readers who wouldn’t ordinarily find your site, but also provides a different take on who you are.

In soliciting guest posts, you present prospective clients with an example of your resourcefulness, and your ability to successfully network and make important connections in your chosen space. You also tell clients who you are by telling them who you associate with, something to keep in mind when selecting potential guest bloggers.

Some of these tips may be obvious, and others might not quite fit with what you have in mind, but at the very least, they should help you think more critically about how you represent yourself on the web, and that’s always a good thing.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.