Lets say you sign up on social networks using your websites name for example "Tangler" then you find out that someone has already got it.

What do you do?

Now let's say you sign up using your real name "Cesar Castro" and you find out someone else is using it as well.

How actively do you pursue protecting your online identity?

Very actively....

I'm lucky that dekrazee1 hasn't been picked up by anyone else yet, but if it does, I revert to another nickname. And if that one doesn't work too, then that's it, I'll probably not sign up....

Why? Because it is my identity. I don't have to go around telling everyone who I am on all the different sites. If you see 'dek' any where, that's me! 
Sometimes I wish that I could officially own the name (not like a domain) but register it as a legal online name kinda thing, and no one else can use it

I don't think I mind that much apart from the fact that it peeves me to have to remember so many username / password combinations. I am eagerly awaiting the uptake of OpenID and am working on making sure that all sites I produce moving forward support the standard.

If a site will not allow searching by name and / or email as well as username, and my typical username is taken then I will not sign up.

People I know have typically tended to know how to find me and that has been enough. However, what I am coming to grips with now is that the personalities behind a company are as important as the company itself, and with that in mind I am in the process of consolidating my identity. ie. organising my facebook, linkedin, tangler, pownce and blog profiles.

I am also watching with interest the evolution of identity aggregation services. It will be interesting to see what happens in this space.

What is identity aggregation?

In theory it is a way of pulling together all of your disparate profiles and managing them centrally. Unfortunately there are no real standards as yet, so your guess is probably as good as mine as to where it will end up, or how it will work.

The word 'aggregation' is getting thrown around almost as much as the word 'social' now...

Identity Aggregation just happens to be the term used in the last article I was reading. Another piece of interest in this space is the Open Friends Format as labelled in Mashable?

hmmmm.... so it'll be easier to online stalk someone?

But seriously, that would be good....
What I'd prefer is being able to use one profile for everything - so if I sign up to FaceBook, MySpace and Friendster, all I need to do is put in dekrazee1, and all my stuff, inc overlapping contacts, profile, photos are imported directly

Check out WebFS. Without completely being across it, we're hopefully seeing an emerging standard that's all about ownership and central maintenance of content. Your data centrally stored and maintained in one place by you.

The thing that is going to slow change is the uptake by the major players. This does give the rest of us a chance though, as the first ones to do it have the opportunity to take a really big piece of the market.

Oh! Is that was WebFS is about? I never got it

kind of...

Don't you have Omnidrive in your building now?

hehehe yesh....

But I usually don't get these things until someone comes along and explains it to me in simple language

When they explain it to you then, pass it on

I sure do!

I have different names depending on where I am.. blog comments I tend to use Matt` (the little ` thingy makes me different from all the other Matts out there )

On forums and such I to use the same name, or some variant on it depending on whether punctuation is allowed or if there's a minimum number of letters or anything like that. I can't remember what it was that prevented me using my normal one on Tangler .. maybe it was already taken or there was something not allowed about it... now I use SK for all the stuff I've found via Tangler so you guys know it's me , so Weewar and any startups I sign up for and such

Other sites where all the names are taken I use my surname because its pretty uncommon, normally add an initial before it as well just in case, my email addresses are all along those lines (marginally so I can later use them for work stuff without having to explain where the name came from)

I'm not too protective about my online identity, if anything I'd prefer it to be difficult to link all my online names together and back to me, but that's just the paranoia talking 

I find that a there's a generation factor in how we manage our online identities. My generation was told to be careful and not put too much info out etc etc, but these days, esp with the sites like Flickr and MySpace etc, I notice that younger people (around my bro's age) don't really care! Everything's on their profiles and it's so easy to track them from site to site.

So what is the paranoia with putting your name online?

Me personally or are you asking generally?

I try and keep the same identity from site to site as well - in many cases people know me as the madmadmummy rather than my real name!

I know alot of people who are really paranoid about putting any details about themselves online. The main concerns I find are identity theft and having someone actually track you down and assault you in some way. He is constantly telling me no photos of him or mentioning his name on my blog!

I kind of think that the internet is just another way that predators can do this - if you really want to protect yourself, sit at home and do nothing. Don't get a bank account, phone line, don't use eftpos etc - as terrible as it sounds if someone wants to get you they will!

Unfortuanately, its not just a matter of Identity theft... its also about the unknown future.

Things on the web mean that your opinions can be brought up against you many years later (witness the broadsides going each way between candidates of the same party in the run up to the US presidential race).

Perhaps it will change over time (as the 'younger people,' as dekrazee1 one calls them never sink to the caricature that one's opinions when young should be the same as they are when older).

Any man who is under 30 and is not a Liberal has no heart; and
any man who is over 30 and not a Conservative has no brains.
    - Winston Churchill

ps .That said anyone who looks up my account 'nom de plume' will see my real name .... but I like this one for my online persona.

@dekrazee i ask in general?

Your name alone shouldn't have you scared to put online because of identity theft, maybe if your where going to publish a full scale bio with contact number, house address, full name, partial social security number, driver license number, place of birth and all that stuff then maybe identity theft would come to play.

About the unknown future I would have to say the people's consideration of everything being caught and documented online will definitely change as time goes on. The internet is still young, more and more people, young and old are jumping on board to see what's happening. It's only logical that as time progresses people will understand the what you said when you were let's say 24 is not what you would say at 47. As time changes so do people.

I thought this was an interesting and possibly related article:

At Rapleaf, your personals are public

Privacy advocates, of course, have complained about aggregation of personal content like this for years. Put this information in the wrong hands--of say, a stalker--and you could have a problem. In the hands of a government, it's a means to spy; in the hands of a hacker, it's an opportunity for identify theft; and in the hands of a marketer, it's a potentially lucrative business.

That's particularly true because this coalesced data could be personally identifiable--tied to names, e-mail, physical and IP addresses and other details on the person's habits. At a time when the heat is on search engines like Google and Microsoft to regularly purge personally identifiable and search history data on users, sites like Rapleaf are amassing detailed profiles from publicly available data.

"There's no question we've entered an era where people are simultaneously living their lives online. But there's a naive quality here that these sites have set up. The sites appear to be cool, but what lurks underneath is a powerful force designed to stealthily observe and collect data about you, and develop a marketing campaign to get you to behave the way they want," said Jeff Chester, director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a Washington-based consumer advocacy group.

For this reason, the Center for Digital Democracy will ask the Federal Trade Commission at a November hearing to formally open an investigation into privacy issues at social-networking sites. "Clearly, a (privacy) standard is necessary," Chester said.

"Hi guys! This Conference sounds to be great! They have very interesting panels on identity and a featured panel on Barak Obama and you can also make a real African Safari...."

<p><font>The Institute of Identity Research (IDmap) announces an international conference</font></p> <p><font>on Identity Politics on the Internet to be held in Kenya on the 27th to 29th of</font></p> <p><font>August 2009. The aim of the Conference is to create discourse in the area of</font></p> <p><font>Identity politics on the Internet and other related topics.</font></p> <p><font>The Conference will be graced by several leading scholars who have written and</font></p> <p><font>researched extensively on issues of Identity. We hope that this conference will</font></p> <p><font>result in solutions and better understanding of the problems facing issues of</font></p> <p><font>identity in the contemporary context.</font></p> <p><font>AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE</font></p> <p><font>IDENTITY POLITICS ON THE INTERNET</font></p> <p><font>August 27-29, 2009</font></p> <p><font>Organized by Institute of Identity Research (IDmap)</font></p> <p><font>www.idmap-conferences.net</font></p> <p><font>Will be held in Amboseli Wildlife National Park, Kenya</font></p> <p><font>Featured panel: Barack Obama' Election and Kenyan politics of Identity:</font></p> <p><font>Will he identify himself with the World or with his People?</font></p> <p><font>· The Dead line for submission of the Abstracts is 01.05.2009 (200-500 words)</font></p> <p><font>in Word or PDF formats</font></p> <p><font>· The Dead line for submission of full-text papers is 01.07.2009</font></p> <p><font>Preliminary program of the Conference includes the following panels:</font></p> <p><font>· Kenyan 2007 Presidential elections and the Internet</font></p> <p><font>· Traditions and Identity in Kenyan politics: Barak Obama as a Luo</font></p> <p><font>representative of Kenyan identity politics</font></p> <p><font>· Facebook and Identity: do old ethnicity definitions still matter?</font></p> <p><font>· World Identity politics: Case-studies and Comparative Analysis</font></p> <p><font>· Parties and recruitment in the digital world</font></p> <p><font>· Gender, ethnicity and empowerment: what is better to be a white man or a</font></p> <p><font>black woman?</font></p> <p><font>· When religion comes to the Internet: the new ways to build and reinforce</font></p> <p><font>religious identity</font></p> <p><font>· Government on the Internet: new ways to preserve Nation-state and its</font></p> <p><font>identity on the Net</font></p> <p><font>· New English and E-Linguistic: jargon and vocabulary of Internet campaigns</font></p> <p><font>Participants are welcomed to join the following working groups:</font></p> <p><font>· Computers and identity</font></p> <p><font>· Culture and identity</font></p> <p><font>· Mathematical expressions of identity</font></p> <p><font>· Internet and Politics</font></p> <p><font>· Internet Vocabulary</font></p> <p><font>Best Identity MA/PhD Thesis work award:</font></p> <p><font>During the conference the Institute will award the best MA/PhD work submitted</font></p> <p><font>for the evaluation. The work should reveal an original and innovative approach</font></p> <p><font>in the field of Identity with its expression on the Internet. Information</font></p> <p><font>regarding submission procedure can be found on our site or through direct</font></p> <p><font>contact of the Administrators.</font></p> </p>

That's some crazy html you've got there...

Just came across this great post in the tech section of The Guardian newspaper on this very subject of Online Identity about a startup called WikiWorldBook that aims to make people easily found via Google and instantly emailable without you being able to see their email address. The site also has a people search engine so you can find people by their social media. So it will tell you how many John Smiths there are on Linkedin, Facebook, MySpace etc and then link you to those specific results. Really interesting and it all looks free.