TheWayoftheWeb

The always interesting Marcus Brown has initiated  ‘Social Psycho, a Creative Commons project’ – which is a crowdsourced work/works of fiction around some interesting questions relating to our increasingly social and networked world.

For some reason, when I started getting into blogging and social media in a semi-formal way, I decided to use the following picture as my avatar everywhere:

BadgerGravling aka Dan Thornton

As a result, at recent events I’ve chatted to several people who knew and chatted with my online identity, but didn’t realise it was me for quite a while.

Which is funny, but also highlights the weakness of not having more pictures of me in circulation, as I might be missing out on some really good conversations.

So, seeing as I received a very cool free T-shirt from Socialmedian, a service which I’m using more and more, I thought I’d take a picture to help me people identify me a little more easily.

Does this help?

So that should make it a bit easier to spot me at events, conferences and twestivals etc…

In all seriousness, it does highlight a slight problem with using imagery etc as an avatar, rather than a real picture – particularly as I’m between motorcycles and on public transport to a lot of events, and motorcycle crash helmets have a lifespan of about five years – and the same model/paintsheme probably won’t exist!

Just had a boost on a wet Tuesday morning – a name search on Google has always brought me up fairly quickly – but mainly because I worked on a pretty big website within it’s niche.

But having registered www.danthornton.net, and done pretty much nothing with it, I’ve ended up with the eighth result! Take that, owner of danthornton.com, who said they would consider selling and then never came back to me!

The plan was to use that address to accumulate my many networks and conversations, but I still haven’t quite got round to working out exactly how that’s going to work. In the meantime, simply redirecting it to my About page has meant that I’ve got some personal brand presence online that’s totally within my control.

And as Jeremiah Owyang pointed out, there can be big impacts on someone’s online identity and reputation in some circumstances….

Wednesday saw the latest meeting of MeasurementCamp (Big thanks to @willmcinnes for setting it all up and @helenium for sorting out the venue at Dare Digital). It was a bit strange, as I made it to the inaugral event, and then missed the next three for various reasons. There were quite a few new faces in the room, which was good.

Unfortunately both my son and the train service conspired to make me rather late, but I was still able to get a fair bit from the format, which saw groups tackling one of four real world scenarios – it’s great to be applying our skills to something real rather than debating semantics (buzzwords rather than Web 3.0!) as often happens with social media geek gatherings.

And it was quite funny to see how many times Twitter was mentioned compared to just five months earlier – particular as I missed the chance to meet a lot of people, but I was already following everyone in the room except for one (now added!). I still managed to catch up with a couple of people, which was good – and I’m looking forward to the next one.

Keeping on the subject of Twitter, I had the pleasure of chatting to @amandita about microblogging in my first ever academic interview… She’s interviewing a veritable army of people, so I’m really looking forward to seeing the insights she draws out of it…

The only annoying thing was a though that occurred to me after I’d headed back to the train station, about the position Twitter occupies in my online persona – and why it’s probably the most realistic image of me. On other services it’s easier to slip into a certain subset of my identity – either consciously, or just through habit. But the constant and almost instantaneous nature of Twitter means it’s almost impossible to keep up an act unless it’s a real conscious decision – e.g. @amandachapel. And the fact it is a calculated work of artifice is comparatively obvious. The nature of the fake ExxonMobilCorp showed how suspicions could be raised.

Whereas I tend to be fairly serious using LinkedIn. And depending on the recipient, usually fairly serious in email. And Facebook for me is mainly around photos and events with friends, so I tend to be far more sarcastic then normal.

Like so:

I’m intrigued to see whether other people think they’re more ‘real’ on Twitter, or whether they find themselves slipping into a persona, either consciously, or without even thinking about it.