Some insights on the care and feeding of a journalist's identity in cyberspace. I would have posted this on Dec. 31, but Blogware went into a funk -- again. :(

From poynter.org:

Del.icio.us, Twitter, LinkedIn, Go Daddy, Flickr, Pownce.

Mention these site names aloud, and some people might look at you like you're speaking a foreign language. But for the discourse community of social media-savvy people who Tweet on Twitter and pounce on Pownce, these sites are simply a part of their lingo and identity in the online world.

 

A digital identity is your presence on the Web -- the sites and accounts you register for and create that help determine who you are and what you do online. To get a better sense of your digital identity, Google your name. See how many hits appear. Many of the related Web sites may be links to the news organization you work for, but others might link to pages you've never seen before, written by people you don't know. Those people -- often bloggers -- aren't "stealing" your online identity, but they are helping to shape it.

For journalists, who are accustomed to sharing the stories of others, creating and shaping a digital identity can feel risky or misguided.

JD Lasica

Some reporters say the less personal information that's online, the better. But others, like JD Lasica, social media strategist and co-founder of Ourmedia.org, say developing a digital identity creates an opportunity to reach out to the public in new, interactive ways.

"News organizations have for too long practiced journalism as a dark art, and so the public has come to regard journalists and their intentions with a degree of suspicion," Lasica said. "I suppose I tend toward more transparency than most people -- you can easily find my home address online, for example, and the fact that I have an 8-year-old son -- but we're living in the Internet era now. When I take photos in public, my instinct is to return home and upload them to Flickr. Sharing media and information online is the new routine. Younger people just expect that a lot of personal information about their lives will wind up online."

AVATAR PROFILE: Meet Jeff Elder, 44-year-old columnist at The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer.

A digital identity, Lasica says, is more than the profiles you fill out on social networking sites -- it's everything you do online. So, it can be easy to cultivate a digital identity but much harder to control it.

 

To shape what is being said about them online, many journalists are choosing to actively engage in the development of their online presence. On his blog, Lasica lists more than a dozen social networks that he belongs to as a way of encouraging readers to converse with him on some of the sites -- even if the "conversation" is just back-and-forth comments posted online. Lasica belongs to such networks as Flickr, SpinXpress, LinkedIn, Digg, Facebook, Ourmedia, MySpace and Second Life and Facebook.