Web Identity and business cards

With the recent talk of business cards, I decided to make me some personal 名刺 for use in non-corporate context. I used to have some – home-made by my graphic designer brother – but even those were linked to one of my activities, co-founder at MacBidouille.com, and not 100% personal.

This all got me thinking of my web identity – the face I show to the web, which in this day and age is the only world that matters. I am lucky enough to have a rare name, rare enough that I am pretty sure me and my cose-related family (8 people) are the only bearer of this family name. So when you search my name on Google, all the results are actually related to me, myself and I.

However, when looking at these results, the top ones are my profiles at various websites such as LinkedIn or Flickr. Although these are mine and I define what is written there, I do not have 100% dictator-like control over them. This bothers me a little…

openid

So I started working on my webpresence portal, a website that defines me and should eventually become the nº1 search result for my name. It will be the website I write on my business card, and although it currently only shows links to stuff I do, I have plans to expand it with new functionalities: a portfolio and make it an OpenID provider for starters.

Update: Google now offers 10.000 sets of business cards to their Google Profile users.

google-businesscard

They are kinda lame and cool at the same time. Anyways, they do no ship to Japan so I won’t get one. My design is better.

5 thoughts on “Web Identity and business cards”

  1. Actually, I was even thinking this would make a rather nifty webtwozero app (not saying I’d care to build it). Though chances are there probably is smth like that out there already. Still, a sort of easily-deployed piece of code that lets you put a virtual meishi on your website after filling in a couple optional fields… this is something I would download :-)

  2. i’ll have to think about it… it could be a cool project to make on Google App Engine, I could integrate the OpenID thingie there and all
    the whole point would be to have nice URLs though and that’s the hard part -> without a cool URL you might as well just use the new Google profile thing although the design might not be as nice as my jQuery-fu :)

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