Digital presence up date 080112

I have now been working on my digital presence project for over a year. In some areas I have made good progress; in other areas it has been slow going and I still have a lot to learn regarding how I am going to meet my expectations regarding the project. My aim is still the same, to develop a pervasive and enduring presence on the World Wide Web. This update comments on how I think I am going in these two areas.

Pervasive presence

There is no doubt that I now have quite a pervasive presence on the “Net”. If I Google my name I get hundreds of hits from a wide range of sites. I can do searches on my name and key words and still get quite a number of hits. Various items I have posted are now linked into other sites as they troll internet looking for material. I have learned that a key factor in developing a pervasive presence is to ensure that type of posts, and the range of places where these posts are placed, are as diverse as possible. With regard to this I keep finding and developing material on new sites as often as possible.

Enduring presence

Developing confidence that I am developing an enduring presence is much more problematic. If I stopped using the web today I know that my presence would gradually fade. How much this would happen and how fast are unknowns. The Net is still evolving and developing. How this will ultimately impact on links, web sites and the eventual structure  of the Web is also unknown. To ensure that my presence is as enduring as possible I am still:

• Posting a range of diverse material onto the web.
• Posting primarily to web sites that appear to have a level of longevity and robustness associated with them.
• Where possible,duplicating material – particularly photos.
• Testing past posts to check that they are enduring.
• Linking to my own material as much as possible

On the positive side a number of the sites I use have existed for several years now and there seems no obvious reason why they shouldn’t continue to exist into at least the foreseeable future. Many of these sites are becoming increasingly reliant on good linking of the data people are producing; this means the incentive to retain existing links, at least while these sites exist, is quite high.