Is Google my ePortfolio? (revisited)
Quite some time ago (way back in June 2007) I posed this question in a post and while the intent was never really to answer the question with a yes, but to highlight some of the features that are important to eportfolios and their owners, it's interesting to see that in some sort of manner, Google is now offering functionality that eportfolio owners would find useful. It has been possible to create a Google site for quite some time and call it your eportfolio (and many people do so very successfully). Just recently however, Google has released Google Profiles allowing you to create your own profile on Google and have it appear in Google search results. More information on the service can be found at the Google blog. I guess what's interesting or useful about this is that it does give you some control over what is displayed about you in a Google search results page when someone searches your name so you at least get one search result linking to something that you have created and hopefully it has a pretty good page rank. I haven't seen this yet - still working on my profile. So... one of the first things I went to do was to test out where I appear if I do a search. It seems to get a public profile you need to supply Google with quite a bit of information. A name, location and company is not enough. I got a message telling me that to have a public profile I need to supply more information. So I added a bit to the 'short bio' area and created a link to my work blog. For the moment this was all I wanted to be public in my profile. Still, this wasn't enough to satisfy Google. According to the blurb about Google profiles, it:
allows you to control how you appear on Google and tell others a bit more about who you areand
You have control over what others seeWhat's not obvious is just how much information I have to add so that I can 'control' it. At the very least it would be nice to know what are the 'mandatory' bits of information I have to hand over or even what percentage complete I am (eg 70% would at least let me know that I am getting close to the threshold that they want). One interesting aspect of creating my profile is that Google had selected an image of me from somewhere and gave me the option of changing it. The interesting part of this is that while the image was me, it was not one (as far as I can tell, and I am pretty confident in that) that I use on my Google account. It seems to have sourced it from somewhere else and I would really like to know where. I know of three social networks where I use this image and none of them have anything to do with Google. This begs the question of permissions and rights and what exactly I have signed up to in all those networks. Those terms and conditions are far to voluminous and complex for most users to really understand but that's a whole other issue.
technorati tags: Google, eportfolio,social networking
