blogs = everything

Ok, bad title. But the idea is this: using your "blog" as your personal life manager. Use it for taking notes, keeping your calendar, storing your personal links, documents and other information. Publishing the content you want others to access. Managing your personal brand. The blog as your "outer self". Managing your own brand may soon be necessary for every individual as our personal information becomes less and less closely held. Try googling yourself. If your name exists there, your brand is being managed by someone else. Examples abound of people's electronic identities being displayed for the first time through embarrassing or less than flattering ways (e.g. the guys whose names appear on escort service message boards). These cases illustrate the inevitable "outering" of private information that occurs beyond our control.

The reaction to this will be a mix of regulation, new technologies to protect privacy, but controlling ones identity will be a difficult task for most. Information is horded by corporations and governments and huge investments in information technology during the 90s and beyond ensure that such projects will continue. Database technologies are cheaper and easier to manage for businesses of all sizes, and a large industry has been created to provide information/data management services for companies in all markets. The effects on privacy are potentially dramatic. Faced with such change, one must reflect on the nature of privacy itself, and notice that our concept of privacy is relatively new.

The outcome of any efforts to protect our conception of privacy will be challenged by the huge momentum of the technological changes. The internet cannot be turned off. (Lessig) Digital content is difficult to lock down. Efforts to lock down digital content are met with fierce opposition from the internet community, since what is technically deemed piracy is a large part of the appeal of the internet - free content of all types. The internet is valuable precisely because digital content is difficult to lock down. It is made to be shared.

The growth of the "blogosphere" is something to watch. If the growth of blogs does not tail off, it is clear that people are using them not necessarily to acquire a large audience. The vast majority of blogs do not have more than a handful of readers. If having a big audience was the driver, most blogs will disappear sooner rather than later. A sizeable proportion of bloggers use their blogs to manage their online identity. Some of those online identities are different from their real-life identities. Some manage their online identity like their personal brand. Those people are a type of celebrity.

Proper celebrities are famous for more than just having an online identity. Celebrities are likely going to use blogs/personal webpages to manage their personal brand. The internet, despite its reputation as being the source of low-quality of information, is in actuality used as if it is the gospel. Experienced users are able to determine the validity of different sources of information, and can compare multiple sources to guage the reliability of published facts and figures. Official webpages are seen as more reliable than unofficial webpages, even if the content of an unofficial webpage is superior. Celebrities are increasingly using their personal webpages to debunk rumours, present their ideas, connect with their fans, and put a more personal touch to their image.

Blogs provide the opportunity to make a good first impression, something that may become indispensable in the information age, when a google on your name might reveal something you'd prefer to remain private. Having a personal weblog that appears first on google searches might be enough to divert the majority of name-googlers to your own "story", rather than the newspaper article about your arrest for drunk driving.

Controlling your own online identity through "self-outering" may become the best option for celebrities and even everyday people in the information age.