Who am I? Online that is.

Or maybe even, “Who are we?” I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my online presence. When I first started establishing an online presence it was through a hand written blog and then via Movable Type on a domain that was my complete name. Mostly I posted pictures of my friends and I hanging out. The Facebook generation (which I am older than) is now learning what should be obvious, don’t put anything on the Internet you don’t want the world to see.  While nothing I posted was against the law or damaging, I didn’t want pictures of me bleary eyed raising a toast to be too accessible to potential employers, yet they all were attached to my name. So recently I moved all the personal content to a URL of a pseudo name and started posting tech content here.  If I’m committed to keeping both sites up to date (and I am), this is a lot of work. It also has given me a bit of a split personality and I’m starting to regret it.

So I have two types of content create on the Internet: personal and professional.  What’s the best way to separate the two? Also, how do you not bore the respective audience with bits meant for the other? Also, how can it be easy?

The easiest way to do this might have been to have a professional blog and put all the friend stuff in a walled garden like Facebook.  That solution was not viable for me. Over the years my personal site has grown into an extensive hobby and moving it to a homogenized site like Facebook would ruin the fun. I’ve used Movable Type and then Drupal for years to create content and a look not exactly like anywhere else. I want to continue that. I’m also afraid to commit too much to Facebook because I remember how easily Friendster disappeared.

My divided identity solution can be taken even further than two sites. I use the Internet to share posts, videos, pictures, and short messages (tweets). Do I separate all those media across professional and personal lines? I could end up with two Flickr, Vimeo, and Twitter accounts. At some point it all gets ridiculous and I wonder if I am being productive or just falling down a new media OCD hole.

So how does one manage a professional and personal persona online? For most people I would recommend the walled garden. For a lot of people it’s easy because they don’t want to have both or even one persona online and would rather do old fashioned things like see operas or have dinners.

Here are my options:

- Give up on having a professional persona online. – There’s already too many “new media” bloggers, but that’s not my true goal (despite having actually written a post on Twitter). I want to present a portfolio of product ideas, process, and actual applications at this URL, which I believe is beneficial to my career.

- Move my personal content to Facebook or Flickr. – Ugh, that would take a year. It also would kill one of my main hobbies.

- Collapse the identities and the sites and let the audience just deal. – I’m tentatively still committed to separating the two. Along with creating the messages, I do enjoy playing with the media. I don’t think one format can support the two.

This leaves me about where I started when I began typing this conundrum. Going forward I’m going to update this site as a way to share technology information and highlight my work and ideas. Simultaneously I will continue my struggle to come up with the ultimate system for sharing photos, galleries, and posts to multiple blogs on my personal site.

I’m testing a very interesting piece of software called Sweetcron for this site. For my personal site, I’m sticking with Drupal for now, but I might just build a proprietary solution. For all of this, we…er, I mean I, will need some more coffee.