http://www.google.com/profiles/seantconrad

Google announced a new feature today that let’s you share a page of public information about yourself across Google sites: Google Profile. It’s a very cool features, especially if you want to affect how you appear in Google searches. However, it does raise issues of safely and easily people divide their public and personal information. I wrote a post about this when I first branched this blog from my personal one.

My policy now is that anything associated with my name should be written as if it were going to show on my resume. This means Facebook is only good for viewing other people’s posts. Anything personal, I post to a blog using a pseudo name. However, I stick by the overarching policy, anything that you don’t want the world to know, don’t post it on the Internet. Period. I think Google could do a lot of good teaching people that with their default feature sets and instructions.

I just talked my mother through creating her new website on Blogger. This is after she somehow created and lost a domain name with Microsoft “Live” or whatever brand name that world is now. For all I know, her credit card will be automatically charged for that until it expires. Via a NetworkSolutions whois, I know who the registrar is, but I haven’t had time to wait on the line.

For some, the Internet is not easy. For others, it is not easy to make it easy. Especially over the phone.