I have been in this online world since 1993. I can actually find footprints back as far as 1991 – although those are somewhat limited and not as available anymore.
As I have gone through the growth of digital media and sharing things of course have changed. At first it was easy to maintain personal and business info, then flowed into having two separate identities. How many of you had 2 or 3 “cell phones” because of having to keep work and personal separate for privacy and billing purposes?
The the timeframe of it is who you are so it is all together.
Then comes the time where you become like the character Sybil (1980’s character) and not only have business, personal, professional, but also alter identities and characters!
Part of my decisions in how I maintain info was based on “how to maintain info”. So for the most part I am me – one identity mostly konarheim in everything I do online.
Now that I have joined the ds106 club and improving my skills and learning all sorts of new neat stuff that I am applying to family digital stories I am finding that I do need to somehow protect my family in some ways. I know it can’t be 100% but some protocols do need to be in place.
The first challenge is photos. I have 40K of digital photos from 1998 to present that are now in the cloud for backup and family access. To make them available without too many issues they are on Flickr. But they are under my konarheim account which I have used for years as my social photo account. To move all the photos now would be insane. So my decision at this point is to use a second account as my social account. Had I thought sooner, I would have created the second account for family only – but too late for that now without investment of money, lots of time and headaches.
Some of my issues come from jumping on board early or using tools available – as they always will improve and evolve. I don’ t regret those decisions. I fully understand nothing stays the same and longevity means messy.
So just a warning – that as I change over there may be broken links and missing files and if I catch them I will fix.
If you have any great management ideas – I’d love to hear them.
As I am cleaning up historical I am also thinking of how to organize and where to store present forward. Knowing full well it will be the best informed decision of today and undoubtedly can be improved upon when the next new things pop up tomorrow.
