If you're like most of us, you probably spend at least 16 hours a week Googling your name to see what the internet says about you, and more importantly, what other people will find out if they look you up. IdentiFight provides a new tool in the effort to protect, hide, or at least identify your publicly available data.

Here's how it works. You enter your email address into IdentiFight's search engine, and it will look you up on a list of popular social networks and then display the results. The service appears to be facing some scaling issues and has disabled Facebook, Digg, MySpace, and Yelp searches for now. But we were still able to track down some slightly inaccurate data using IdentiFight (apparently someone forgot to update his Friendster profile when he moved from Princeton to Brooklyn).

[via Lifehacker]

Recently I was interviewed by a graduate student who was working on a thesis about representations of female sexual empowerment in popular culture. Much of our conversation centered on women's usage of the internet. One of the first questions she asked me was whether I thought there was still a stigma against women being openly sexual online. After stumbling over my words because I couldn't get the "yes" out fast enough, I gave her an example that shows just how much of a problem this is.

I go to a lot of conferences, unconferences, and all variety of social media-oriented events. Frankly, I'm feeling a little conferenced out at this point. Anyway, at each of these events I go to, there's almost always a panel or session or discussion group focused on the question of how to "present yourself" online – usually framed in a business context. And even if there isn't a session nominally devoted to this topic, it ends up coming up sooner or later. It's obligatory, just like the incessant "bloggers vs. journalists" debate.

These discussions can get quite heated, with people becoming very earnest about not wanting to look "unprofessional" online. Women in particular tend to get very worked up about it (which isn't surprising; there are expectations placed on us that men won't ever experience). Without fail, the ultimate example of "unprofessional" is always something sexual. Someone will be ranting about the presentation of their professional demeanor online and attracting new clients and blah blah blah, and it's only a matter of time before they make an offhand remark like, "So, I'm not going to go around posting naked pictures or anything!" Such comments are usually received with much laughter and nodding in agreement.

So, YES, if one's sexuality is the ultimate representation of what it means to be unprofessional, then absolutely we have a problem here.

Now that so many sites seem to be adopting OpenID, you might have decided that you want one. You may also have decided that you don't want it tied to your circa 1997 AOL screen name (I'm looking at you cyrano99). What better than to tie your online ID to your real identity and keep things nice and simple?

Enter FreeYourID.

The FreeYourID service combines a personal domain in the .name TLD with an OpenID provided by MyOpenID. since your OpenId will be tied to your .name url, it is theoretically good for life--or as long as you keep the DNS registry up to date--rather than your tenure with with AOL, LiveJournal, another service. And since it's based on your name you should have less compunction about using it in a professional context than, say hottl33gs.

In addition to the OpenID, FreeYourID also includes forwarding of both your .name email and url to addresses of your choice.

They're currently running a 90-day free promo, and membership is $10.95 per year after that. If you don't like it, you can transfer your .name domain to another registrar if you want to keep it.

So far, I've stayed away from OpenID, mostly because I haven't wanted to tie my identity to any particular url. The ability to easily combine the ID with a .name domain, though, may be what finally pushes me over the edge. It would certainly make life a lot simpler.

There is one "gotcha," though: I wouldn't use the service for any particularly secure application yet. Passwords can only contain upper and lower case letter and numbers. Attempts to enter punctuation or other characters result in an "invalid character" warning. That seems pretty short-sighted to me.

[via Phil Windley]

Sxipper is a Firefox (1.5 or 2.0) add-on that allows you to set then forget your personal details. All your logins will be kept safe behind your own personal guard dog. It strikes me a lot like roboform, but is free for use and stores all your info for work, personal, openID, and all your other identities. Sxipper lets you hand-pick the color and icon for your profile, and even import a v-card. If you watch the video above, you'll notice that it is only 18 seconds long. This is how fast it is to use Sxipper. I remember hearing about Sxipper a while back when it was just a twinkle, and thought it was a great idea, so it is really cool to finally see it in action. Sxipper is a bit more powerful than most password managers, and aims to be your one stop shop for protecting all your personal information by logging you in securely. The biggest benefit is not having to fill-in forms, and selecting what type of information you want to share with a website. It won't be long before you will be entering in all your favorite bugmenot logins, so you don't even have to go look those up either. Sublime.

Source: Sxipper