The Internet has made it easy for us to get ahold of information. Information about history, from literature, movies, gossip...the list goes on. And as social networking becomes commonplace amoung the young the ease to find out personal information online has increased dramatically.
If you haven't heard, there have been cases where Facebook users have been caught out saying nasty things about their employers and in one case getting caught taking a sicky when they weren't really sick, costing the employee their job.
Evermore is your own trademark, your own intellectual property, your name and everything that goes with it, now something that can condemn you or make you shine. Once upon a time your name and your reputation made its way via word of mouth and if you ever stuffed up it'd be rare if your next employer would find out. How that contrasts with today. I can lookup my doctor/hair dresser/physio/massuse/whatever on Facebook and find out who his friends are, see the photos of his last birthday party, so on...
But how does this really affect you? If I was interviewing you tomorrow, prior to our appointment I would have Google'd you, Facebook'd you, and so on. If I was hiring you for web design, and I found a poor eye-sore of a personal home page, I'd probably discard you there and then. If I was hiring you for something else and found you bad-mouthing your last employer on Facebook, I'd probably discard you too.
So this lead myself to ask, what can I do to protect my online reputation and my name. The obvious thing is commonsense. Don't act online in anyway you wouldn't act offline. The second, and something I strongly encourage you to do is I registered [myname].com, i.e. leighmcculloch.com. With Google searches it's easy to get a domain in the top 10 if it exactly matches a search, so if you put up a web page stating who you are and your qualifications, you'll have a presentable online version of yourself for future employers to find. If you're not web-savvy, there are a few options online that make it very easy to get a website with little to no technical knowledge.
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