My digital foot. That right there confused me so much at the beginning of this process. What actually is it? How come I never thought of it before? Pre-assignment I had never realized that what I put on the internet can be accessed by anyone that is looking. From my Facebook, to my Twitter, to the site I made in grade 10, everything is up for the world to see by just a click of the mouse.
In step one of this assignment, we were asked to search for our name on different search engines to gather data on our digital foot print and what they says about us.
Here is the actual post that I created in response: https://evinlachance.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/digital-footprint/
To just some up the post I began by entering my name in Google, 123people, and Pipl. Then from that I got a sense of who I am on the internet. From what I learned about my footprint, was that my footprint was made mostly of leisure actions preformed on the web (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace), and on occasion an article would appear about my extra-circular life (volunteering and school). Overall I was happy with what I saw, I appeared top on the list, and none of my links were incredibly embarrassing or self-damaging. Due to this step I learned about what a digital footprint actually was, and what was good and bad in it. This allowed me to judge it.
Within the same post we were also asked, “ would you want an employer or teacher to see that? what do you want it to show and say?” I replied by saying this: “I would not want an employer or teacher to see it. I feel that I need time to develop my digital footprint, and at this state I have more social leisure links than professional ones. If a person were to search for me I would rather have more professional links.” Honestly, this is the best response for the question at hand. What I’ve learned from this response is the need to research who I am, and how I perceive myself is how others will. And in this case if I see more leisure sites than professional, others will this see this, and If i see this as a negative, others will mostly likely see it in the same sense. through this I can develop my digital foot print.
The next step consisted of trying to get one of my more professional links to the top of the list. I choose to try to get my WordPress blog to the number on spot.
I kept a small journal about what I did, to accomplish this goal: https://evinlachance.wordpress.com/2010/09/23/trying-to-be-first/
From this process I learned that when dealing with Google the more hits you get on your site the higher it will go on your list. I have also learned that meta tags will help optimize the selection process, if I link to that site from other sites it will become more popular, and if I tag keywords into my blogs such as evin & lachance. These seem to have worked for me cause if you plug-in evin lachance in Google my WordPress blog will appear first. Ahh sweet success 🙂
Over I feel this experience was well worth it. I learned about my digital footprint, how I should look at it, and how I can manipulate it.
Blog of Evin Lachance 