An online web persona is essentially a collection of online personal effects: web pages, profiles, and accounts. It’s important to have a well maintained web persona for a few reasons: to be easily discovered by potential employers, to build connections, and to be easily contacted. I try to saturate search results for my name with sites that I control to ensure that the online image of myself is well formed and professional. To aid in that professionalism, it’s important to unify all personal effects under one domain name (in my case, luke.hoersten.org).
The four most important units of my web persona are my personal website and unified login (luke.hoersten.org), and my email and instant message handle (luke@hoersten.org). The email address and website are trivial to set up with a custom domain name but the unified login and instant message handle can be harder. OpenID and Google Talk can aid in the customization.
Unified Login: Custom OpenID URL
OpenID is a decentralized single sign-on system. Using OpenID-enabled sites, web users do not need to remember traditional authentication tokens such as username and password.
— Wikipedia
OpenID is finally starting to get wide-spread use! For me, though, the biggest turnoff to OpenID is the horrible choice of OpenID provider domain names. If I’m going to be picking a one-size-fits-all login, I want it to look good, right? While setting up my own OpenID Provider, I realized that OpenID is intended to use any site I own as my OpenID login. That means I can get an OpenID provider anywhere, as long as the URL I’m using as my OpenID URL is linked to my OpenID provider. Here’s how it’s done:
- Sign up for an OpenID provider. This is what will handle the authentication
- Link a personal website to the OpenID provider. This is the URL which will be used to log in to OpenID enabled websites.
<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" /> <link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://youraccount.myopenid.com/" />
Now I am able to log in to OpenID enabled websites with “luke.hoersten.org” even though my OpenID Provider may be with myOpenID or some other provider. This is because “luke.hoersten.org” forwards to my real OpenID.
IM Handle: Custom Jabber
Getting a personalized instant message handle is not easy. There are many different IM networks and matching all of those to a personal brand can be tricky. Luckily Google is really pushing Google Talk.They’ve added support for the largest IM network, America Online Instant Message (AIM), so now a Google Talk handle has one of the widest exposures. Google also has something called Google Apps which allows users to bind parts of their domain name to certain functions like Jabber IM and email. This is what I use for both email and IM, and it’s free. Sign up for Google Apps and set up both email and a custom Jabber account all in one place.
The new Google Talk account can be accessed with any Jabber client. Here is the Pidgin setup:
Completing a Web Persona
Of course, the above steps are only a few in creating a complete online persona. Web Worker Daily has some great posts about why someone would want an online persona and how to build a complete persona. Both Google and Yahoo! allow unrelated email addresses to be added to your respective accounts. Google has a special secret page for this and Yahoo! can be controlled right from the profile screen. Hopefully both will allow OpenIDs to be attached in the near future.
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