Stake Your Claim Online

^{Photo by EduTourist}

The new communication is social. Tools like Twitter and Facebook represent a big portion of the way people are beginning to do business with one another. In Africa, it’s not so much important that you do these things because you’re ‘trendy’ or ‘in-the-know’, rather we need to make the world aware of who’s here. It’s much harder to ignore crises in Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Darfur, South Africa etc. When you actually know people there.

But beyond that, if you’ve ever read Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point you understand that widening your social network is one surefire way to increase the number of opportunities that will be available to you as an individual. It’s simple the more people you know, the more the diverse you are, the more diverse chances you’ll have to do different things. That said, here are services that I think are essential to establishing your identity online, both professionally and for personal use.

Web Based Resume

In my professional career I’ve gotten more work off the web than I have in any other place, save word of mouth. Put your resume online and link to it from wherever you can! If nothing else it gets it indexed on search engines so that down the road people searching for someone with your skills can find you. My resume, is online and marked up with microformats for easy machine parsing. Which brings us too…

hCard/vCard

Create an hCard/vCard and link to it from your website. hCards are microformated to be machine readable, when a web app scans your website for contact information it will find the card, parse the data and use the proper information accordingly. vCards are similar but they allow the information to be moved from ‘the cloud’ to the desktop applications like Address Book.

You can make a free downloadable vCard with Technorati Kitchen.

OpenId

OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience. Websites that authenticate with OpenId only need one thing, a url and your existing username and password. This way you only have three things to remember from site to site instead of many things. A number of really big websites like Google and Yahoo have already adopted this protocol for creating new accounts which is good. In ubiquity lies utility. Any website can be made to offer OpenId authentication, I turned my personal website into my OpenId Url but you can also use sites like the one below.

ClaimId

ClaimId is a website that attempts to have everyone on the net aggregate all content related to them on the web. This is invaluable if you have a common name like Jack Johnson and you want to make sure people know you aren’t a world famous singer-songwriter. For everyone else, it’s still a good place to pull together all the content you want people to know about. Then you can link to it from your professional sites, add it to your business card or simply just let it be, knowing that it will rank pretty high in some search engines.

ClaimId will also generate an hCard for you.

Gravatar: Globally Recognized Avatars

As much a people don’t like to admit it, there’s an assumption that most people doing things on the internet look a certain way. And for the most part they might be right, North America currently accounts for most of the Internets users and most people there, according to recent census info, are caucasian. To change that mindset, people who look different, whether you’re of African, Asian or Latin descent, it’s important to show your face. Gravatar allows you to upload a picture to one place, then when you blog, join social networks or comment on other blogs, it automatically adds your picture. It only works if the site you’re using has he service turned on but these days that’s quite a few websites.

Does this matter? Yes. Because even if you aren’t affected, it might encourage people who look like you to be more active online.

Facebook

From your face to your Facebook! This social network should go without introduction but in case you’ve been living off the grid for the past five years, Facebook is a web service that attempts to connect you with the real world people that you know through work, school and your email communication. It ingeniously and famously beat out MySpace to become the world’s most active and fastest growing Social Network, because of this focus on “who you might already know” versus who just clicks a button to add you as a friend (Take that Tom!).

Twitter

People can tell me that Twitter is a waste of time until the Sun goes nova and swallows the earth…it’s just not true. Sure some people will find it mundane, annoying and boring; but just like anything else, some people just aren’t going to get it. Like your grandma who still hates her cellphone, just because you can’t get with the times doesn’t mean the rest of the world won’t. Anyways, Twitter is a great place for meeting new people or microblogging about your daily doings. It can also be used as a marketing tool. For instance 35% of this blogs new traffic now comes from people clicking on links I send to Twitter. Try to tell me that isn’t useful.

Another note, for a lot of businesses and professionals, Twitter is beginning to replace email as the preferred place for communication.

Google Profiles

gProfiles is reltively new. Google only introduced it to the public a few weeks ago but it’s already by far the best “profile” of my on the web. Take a look at my profile here. What’s most cool is that Google Profiles lets you define all the places you’ve previously lived, your past schools and work places. It’s one step removed from turning gMail into one of the largest social networks ever and because the pages are housed on Google, they tend to rank pretty high in searches. From my Google Profile, I link to projects of mine plus my resume and my other social network accounts.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is like Facebook for working professionals. Not that people on Facebook aren’t, it’s just LinkedIn focuses on professional relationships and work related communication whereas Facebook simply wants you to socialize regardless of the context. LinkedIn has also supplanted Monster.com as one of the worlds leading job-hunting web services. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of jobs listed outside of the North America and Europe. Why is that? Because not enough companies outside those places are using it. Let’s change that.

Afrigator

As far as I know, Africa has yet to really put forth any ubiquitous Social Networks. There’s Mashada, Blueworld and Africa Online, but given the size of the continent, none of them are anywhere close to the ‘ubiquity’ of sites like Facebook and MySpace were in their home countries before going abroad. The turth is, the African Social Web is fragmented and the one thread tying it all together seems to be Afrigator. Afrigator is a blog aggregator with a reach of nearly 2 million that pulls in content from various African social networks and blogs. If you have a blog, submit it to Afrigator so that they can track the continent’s local content. It also distinctly lets people know your blog is out there and that it’s African.

Similarly, try Amatomu, another African social media aggregator.

Wikipedia

Let me clarify, I’m not suggesting you head on over to world’s largest open encyclopedia and start writing entries about your cat or getting laid off. I’m suggesting that Africans head over to the service to become the moderators and editors of facts about Africa! A novel concept right? There’s no reason why Europeans and Americans should be dominating subjects like Paul Kagame. There’s no point in complaining about that either, change it by being proactive.

Email

I put this last because I don’t want to come off patronizing but of course the first step to claiming your identity online is to have one. There isn’t a web service on this list that doesn’t require an email address to sign up for so start there. Personally, I recommend Gmail.

Doing just these five things can go a long way to introducing yourself and your skills and interests to the world!