People who have been dooced are not in short supply. There was Joe Gordon who wrote unflattering things about his employers. Rather more unfairly there was Petite Anglaise, who was seemingly sacked for merely existing. Or something. And of course there is Heather Armstrong.

Because of all this, there is a bit of a fear about employers discovering your blog. I guess that is a bit old-fashioned now. More salient is the issue of MySpace and Facebook accounts being discovered. Blogs must seem relatively benign compared to some MySpace profiles.

Nevertheless, there is still a bit of a dilemma. What do you do if you are a blogger who is hunting for a job? I am getting to the stage where I am starting to think seriously about this issue. By this time next year I am supposed to have graduated and be doing a proper job. I now have to contend with the fact that large swathes of my personal life and opinions are out there in the open.

I’m not upset or angry about that. I was always aware that it would be the case. But it’s an interesting problem to tackle. It is pretty much accepted that nowadays employers will Google job candidates as a basic check.

True, you could blog anonymously. But I let that cat out of the bag years ago. Anyone searching for my name will find my website, this blog and my accounts for Bebo, Jaiku and Twitter — all on the first page of results.

Thankfully, while the general advice to blogging workers a few years ago was to keep it under your hat, nowadays I am seeing more and more people saying that having a blog is actually a boost to your career prospects. I am still not entirely convinced. Sitting in a Web 2.0 bubble, it is easy to say that blogging is great. But in my day-to-day life I still feel as though blogging is something that many people scoff at.

I mean, it is probably fair to say that blogging is a hobby for me. And hobbies are generally spoddy, right? Trainspotting, stamp collecting, fishing. It’s okay to be a nerd if it’s a hobby. Yet I would probably still be more comfortable listing ‘philately’ as a hobby than ‘blogging’. If somebody asks me what I did last night I will usually say, “Oh, nothing really. Just relaxed a bit.” But in reality I probably spent three hours blogging.

That is not because I am ashamed of my blog. Far from it. But the fact is that if I was to say to somebody that one of my biggest achievements was my blog, people would think I was the most utterly lame person alive. “Oh, you’ve got a blog? I had one of them once. So, who reads your blog? Your mum?”

The unfortunate fact is that for most people out there, a blogger is at best a wannabe writer who is not talented enough to be a professional. At worst, a blogger is a rambling, incoherent, narcissistic teenager.

The crux of the matter is this. You and I know that blogging can be a pretty worthwhile activity. But what does the person reading my CV think?

It could go either way I guess. I am in a hairy situation because my CV is rather bare. And as excellent as my current workplace is, I am guessing that it will take a bit more than filling shelves to impress potential employers.

The truth is that blogging probably is one of my better achievements. It has certainly been my main extracurricular activity over the past few years. So I think I will throw caution to the wind and stick it on my CV. After all, chances are that they will find it via Google anyway. I am also convinced that my years of blogging has given me lots of skills. That is actual skills, not M4D 5K1LL5.

Rhys Wynne has blogged about the skills that he has gained from blogging. And, via Rhys Wynne, I have also found this list of useful skills that bloggers have.

I mostly agree with them. I will explain why tomorrow.

Update: I have now posted the list here.

Top Law Student (down at the moment; mirror here) has a post reminding you that your MySpace page is available to anyone. (I guess even if you set your MySpace to ‘private’ it won’t really work because MySpace is crumbly and insecure.) There is also the discussion on Digg.

I had assumed that most people are aware of this. Employers do look up job applicants on Google. It’s a basic security check; common sense if you’re an employer. And when they search for you, they see all the shit you put on the web under your name. That includes all of the ridiculous embarrassing stuff you put on MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, everything.

If this scares you, then follow the advice on Top Law Student. Delete your MySpace page, or change it all so that you’re anonymous. Me? I will just be sensible about what I put on MySpace, this blog, and anywhere else on the internet. Obviously that limits what I can write about. But life isn’t perfect. If you wouldn’t put it on a billboard on the street, don’t put it on the internet. Simple as that.

It is an interesting issue though. I reckon the number of young people who have some kind of web presence — be it a blog like mine or a MySpace or a Bebo or whatever — is probably approaching something like 90–100%. The vast majority of them are written as though only friends can read them.

I guess employers would have to be really naive to expect all of their employees to be squeaky-clean. But it is obviously rather better for them not to be 100% aware of your debaucheries. But if everybody puts embarassing shit on their MySpace that could put potential employers off, employers will probably find themselves fast running out of good candidates. They will probably have to start choosing the least-worst person for the job instead of (in their eyes) a really good person.

Of course, now that I’ve given a big lecture on it, I will probably find myself being pwned by a potential employer for something I’ve written on my blog at some point. I’m half expecting one day to wake up and find an angry crowd of lone protesters, each one angry about something different I wrote in the dim and distant past. One despises me for recommending an Autechre album. Another thinks I’m an idiot for siding with Michelin in the US Grand Prix fiasco. A small cluster wants to burn me at the stake because I think the text function on my iRiver is useless.

But I’m willing to take responsibility for what I’ve written. I hope, when I am ready to enter the Big Bad World, I will be able to work in an environment where my blog won’t be an issue. Maybe that’s wishful thinking, but hey, I’m a blogger. That’s just who I am. I don’t see this as a reason to run scared of the internet. I hope my activity is a positive thing.

Obviously it is far too late for me to attempt to hide myself on the internet now. Early on I made a decision not to hide my identity. But at the same time I didn’t force it down people’s throats. For a period I never mentioned my name on this blog. But in the end I decided to actually push my identity a bit more, but to be sensible about what I write.

claimID is one way to do it, but the jury is out on whether or not it’s of any good use. I’ve also devised my own little way (it’s unfinished, by the way) to keep tabs on my internet activity. On the one hand it might seem a bit narcissistic, but hopefully it gives me a bit of control over my identity on the internet.

In a way it can be seen as a small step in the battle against Google’s domination. If you search for yourself the chances are that a whole load of people who aren’t you will come up. There might even be somebody impersonating you. Part of the idea of claimID is to put a stop to all this. So excuse me while I name this link Duncan Stephen for the Googlejuice.

But is claimID actually useful? I mean, I could just put all of the information right here on this blog. I have done similar things in the past. I link to my Flickr, del.icio.us and all the rest of it, and you all know that it’s mine. And as for people who aren’t me, surely common sense would tell most people that I am not any of the people that I have listed in claimID.

Still, I do find the service appealing. It goes to the heart of something that does make you think as a blogger — how your blog is wrapped up with your identity. Is it wisest for a blogger remain anonymous? My name appeared in the first paragraph. It’s the first time my name has appeared on this blog for a while.

Bloggers receive mixed messages as to whether or not they should be open about their identity. On the one hand we are told that employers don’t like bloggers because they can air dirty secrets or call their bosses sweary words or whatever. We think of Heather Armstrong, Joe Gordon, and so on.

Those cases generated debate, but I think it’s a bit silly to be talking about work like that in your public blogs. The defence is that talking about work on your blog is like talking about your work down the pub. Except it’s not. It’s more like putting a massive billboard up in the street saying, “My boss is a bastard!”

For sure, I sometimes write about day-to-day situations, but I no longer identify anybody unless I have their permission or I am certain that they won’t mind. I did write about people on my blog in the past. But that was before anybody read the thing. I was young and foolish, etc, etc. Before long Google was all over it and I got my hands burnt. I learned my lesson. I know to respect others’ privacy as I would expect my own to be preserved.

So hopefully that shouldn’t (now) be an issue for me. But I have read about employers who just disliked the fact that prospective employees even had a blog. I once read a boss launching into a massive tirade about job applicants mentioning their blogs in their CVs. The boss then proceeded to read the blogs all the way through from start to finish. He was unimpressed with all the posts about breakfast and suchlike. But if you’re going to insist on reading personal blogs like that as though they are extended job applications then you are bound to be disappointed.

These are reasons why a blogger might want to remain anonymous. I decided from the start that there wasn’t much point in trying to protect my anonymity. I want to write about myself, and part of the reason why I started my blog was to keep friends up to date (never mind how the blog evolved to become the thing it is today), so obviously I wanted my friends to know about it. Anyway, I am a terrible liar. If I kept myself anonymous this blog would probably be awful (no sarcastic comments on this please).

Plus, being open about your identity isn’t necessarily a disadvantage. I’m returning here to a point I made in a recent post about the strange advice sometimes given to bloggers. MatGB pointed out that a lot of this advice is geared towards pro bloggers.

One such piece of advice was that having a blog is essential for your career because it “sets you apart as an expert in your field”. What field would that be then? Jonny Greenwood?!

Still, it is a good point. Lots of bloggers are now putting their full names in prominent positions because they want to advertise their abilities as a writer. And that’s why many of us have a blog, right?

Still, recently I took a decision to downplay my identity. It is said that employers often search Google for information on job applicants just as a basic security check. So imagine if a potential employer was nervous about the fact that I had this blog? If I wanted to work as a writer or something like that it might not be much of a problem, but what about any other profession? I haven’t decided what path I want to go down yet, so it might be best to play safe for the time being.

But I’ve found out that there’s not much point in trying to remove all trace of my name. The game has already been given away, and anybody with their head screwed on will easily find out that I have a blog. Besides, soon enough employers won’t be able to avoid employing bloggers — it’s difficult to think of anybody who hasn’t got some form of online presence, be it a blog, a MySpace or something else.

So for the time being I will welcome claimID with open arms. With claimID I am not anonymous — there wouldn’t be much point to it if I was. But I do have a degree of control over what information people will see about me.

Usually if you search for something in Google there is little context. For instance, somebody searching for something on the internet might come across a post that I had written two or three years ago, and that will be all they see of me. It won’t be placed in context at all. They won’t be aware that it is just one post out of thousands that I have made, that I might well be sarcastic, or my views might have changed, or whatever else. Plus, there is at least one other doctorvee lurking out there, and numerous other people that appear if you search for my name in Google.

Hopefully my claimID page will become one of the top results when searching for me. If it is one of the first things somebody clicks then I will be able to point out what is mine, what isn’t, and the context that everything should be put in. A fine idea.

Update: I just remembered one reason why I might find claimID quite important!

Incidentally, there are all sorts of mentions of me on the internet that I haven’t put in my claimID (I’m not really sure if the articles and posts are sufficiently ‘about me’ to warrant inclusion!). Notable instances can be found in the best of section.

(There is another website that I’ve played around with a bit recently and I thought I would mention: MOG. It seems mostly just like a more crummy — and intrusive — version of Last.fm. I’m sticking with it for the moment, but right now I don’t see much value in it…)