THE DREAM IN ACTION

A few days ago I read a post about document storage from Fred Wilson. His post talked about how his personal document saving practices have saved him on numerous occasions. This along with a few other horror stories I’ve heard recently cause me to purchase an external drive. He went on to talk about how although he’s been advised against saving everything from a legal protection stand point, he’s been helped more times than hurt by “over saving” documents.

Fred also goes on to say…

Here’s my thinking. If you are a bad person who does bad things to people, then by all means destroy the evidence before someone can get at it. But if you try to be a good person and do the right thing, then you should be saving the evidence so when someone tries to paint you as a bad person, you can pull out the email or document and wave it in their face and remind them who did what to whom.

Fred Wilson saves documents because he believes his good actions will help him in the future from bad attacks. The internet and more generally, digital history are increasing the ability and occurrence of ones history being brought into the limelight (for good or bad). Similarly, it is critical for a person to control or at least contribute what is out there about you, thus the importance of a blog and a controlled online presence. If you’re blogging about entrepreneurship for example, and your name is tagged on much of what you write, that picture that someone posted of you hammered a year ago might get buried in the search engines (not that it’s happened to me or anything), This is a perfect example of how contributing to what can be found about you is in a way controlling what can be found about you.

Individuals are beginning to realized during job searches or just Googling themselves that almost everyone has a digital history and something is going to be found out about you. Recently, my fiance had a creepy comment on her blog. I jumped on Google, searched on the guys username, and now I know where he lives, what he does, and could assess his threat level…I’m not worried, but it’s good to know right?

The sooner people accept that involuntary digital publicity is happening and take action toward embracing a public brand the sooner you’ll be able to control what is seen. That’s not to say that you can start a blog and not worry about your “cob webs” but it sure can’t hurt to put your best foot forward. A secondary result and probably more powerful than anything else is the realization that the internet and the ease of exposure will work as accountability for many.

Because you could snap that shot, post it to Facebook, and show the world, I’m not going to do it.

This realization will not happen over night but it will happen, and I truly believe as the level of accountability increases because of the internet and the ease of exposure increases the number of “bad deeds” will decrease. It’s very similar to how crime will drop in an area where the police force increases. Better chance of getting caught = less criminal behavior. The internet is the new sheriff in town.