Hi, my name is...

I’ve just subscribed to a new service that one of my friends alerted me to via the world of twitter (thanks stef) called Unhub.  It’s a service that allows you to bring together your entire web presence and put it all on one page.  And nowadays that web presence is getting larger.  Most people I know who have anything to do with computers have twitter, facebook, linkedin, a blog or ten and maybe a handful of websites.  Add in profiles on digg, delicious, youtube, flickr, myspace and all the other social sites that spring up on a daily basis and you end up with a lot of “personal” content that it’s right should be collected in one place so people can find you when they are interested.

One thing a lot of these sites do is allow you to define who you are and to create a profile page.  As part of this you will create your own name for your online identity.  So for example when you want to see my own twitter page you can go to http://www.twitter.com/edrussell. 

Great!  So I’ll use edrussell for everything.  As part of my day job I deal with several advertising agencies so the idea of branding is pretty stuck in my head, and so the idea of having one “brand” or rather “brand name” for me sound like a good idea.  The problem is that there is more than one Ed Russell.  Much as there will be more than one any name you care to think of, which is why Dave Gorman was able to make an entire series out of finding other people called Dave Gorman.

So for example I wanted to use http://edrussell.com for this blog, but unfortunately that domain is already taken by another Ed Russell who does glass blowing the other side of the pond.  Or when I discovered that LinkedIn were allowing custom addresses I was unable to get http://linkedin.com/in/edrussell as this is an engineer in San Francisco. 

So, does this matter?  Or is it all just rubbish that I’m talking?  But while I’d like to say it doesn’t matter to me it does and when I can’t get edrussell on something then it narks me…  Sites like unhub make this situation better as you can collect you presence into one place but it still would be better if there was a way to identify you as you on all sites.  One way that people do this is to create a new name that hopefully will be unique across all domains.  As an example one of the staff here (Dan Maharry) goes under the name hmobius which is obviously much less likely to clash with anyone else.  Maybe this is the best way to solve this problem, but I’ve been historically rubbish at naming things (E:Vo-9, Naked Electric, Petras-t0i for my musical exploits for example) so I thought I’d stick with my name.  I’m not sure if I regret this decision now but I’ve made it so for me I just need to make sure I’m first onto all new services so I can get what I want.  If I was starting out now, I’d have to think about how to approach this and whether it was important to me…  Then again maybe having unconnected different names to reflect the different functions that you perform on all of the different platforms may actually be beneficial.

Something to consider anyway, for a bit of a Wednesday afternoon ramble!

For reference I can be found at these places:

http://unhub.com/edrussell
http://twitter.com/edussell
http://www.edrussell.coop (or you will when I get it working)
http://linkedin.com/in/edrussellcoop