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…

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.

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.