Where is your “Internet You”?

A week ago I attended the inaugural EpCon conference. EpCon, for those of you who don’t know, is a new technology conference here in Waterloo, Ontario.  The conference featured many speakers and this year it focused heavily on social media, the internet, and entrepreneurship. Most of the speakers were very into the internet and social media. In fact, every single speaker that I saw at the conference posted the name of their twitter account at the end of their presentation. I found this quite interesting because I recently just started using twitter, mostly just to keep up with what my friends were doing.

The speaker during the banquet was an entertaining speaker named Sean Colt, from Thoora with a talk entitled, “Living in the Social Age and why we needed the promise of the Flying Car”. In the middle of his comedic delivery of interesting facts and ideas, he managed to drive home one point for me: in the age of the internet, open information, and linked data, your online presence is becoming really important. If someone looks you up online and comes up with nothing, then you won’t make an impression on them. So with all of our information going “online”, so should we.

I must admit, when the idea of blogs and social networking first popped into the landscape of internet media, I was first resistant to this change. I have been using the internet since back in 1995 when I was a mere 8 years old, and the demographic of the average internet user is much different now than it was in 1995. Back then I the internet wasn’t what I considered to be mainstream, but rather a niche thing that only me and my other nerdy friends knew about. I must admit when I first saw blogs, facebook, and twitter pop up I dismissed them as “trendy” things that “noobs” used. It’s become obvious that these things aren’t trendy, and are in fact here to stay.

I see the internet becoming more and more a user driven experience, where we all get to get up on our soap boxes and broadcast our opinions. In this sense you can think of the internet as a public interaction of many people talking amongst themselves. The set of social phenomena that we see in groups of people can now be applied in new and exciting ways to the internet. We all get to build it together, so if you haven’t done so already, you should think about hooking into the web and building your “Internet You”.