Sunday, 17 July 2011

Branding

I find myself highly resistant to the concept of a personal brand.  It fully accepts a capitalist discourse as a way to describe how you interact with the world.

Online presence - thats a way more useful term for me to use when thinking about this, in a personal sense.   (I fully get the notion of branding for libraries - we are forced to compete in the market and adopt the language of commerce.)

The idea of managing your own "online presence" captures the fact I spent a bit of time on my blog's look and feel.  I always appreciate sites that are simple, with only a few style elements.  I anticipate I'll develop it as I go.  I enjoyed finding the NASA photo, which reflects my current science-y interest.  I had to fess up about the trickiness of choosing a name in my very first post.  

I find this one-to-many broadcast-type format of blogging does make you think about how you "present". And it makes me think about my voice.  I want to be genuine and also protect my privacy.  I love bloggers who are conversational, and  open about who and where they are.    And yet, I try not to reveal too much. Not playing fair!

I decided to keep this separate from my personal accounts, and current work online activities.  I see this as a discrete project and will probably keep it focussed on the 23 things.   This may change as a progress through the weeks, but it feels right for now.  From what I've read of other participants, most feel or are aiming towards more intergration.  That's interesting to me, coz I assumed there would be more diversity in approaches.   


I googled myself as per the task assigned.  This was not a new task to me, though actually I'm more likely to google my friends in bored moments!  It took the second page before an actual hit for the real me appeared - credit for a piece of work I'd been involved in in 2006.  First up was fb results, of course, but not even the real me but immitators with my name.   The rest was mostly those crapola sites that pretend to link to other sites,  that take you nowhere.  It makes me wonder about the increasing fake-ness of google results in general.  Not there this is much of me online, but can't it just say, nope, nuthin' much out there.

No comments:

Post a Comment