It seems to me that most people, and I'm talking about my social media contacts who have profiles on different sites, commonly use the same photo. Now whether that's the abstract one that people wouldn't recognise you from or a media headshot in soft focus or black and white, they tend to become your web identity in its own right.

When it comes to image management of yourself, have you ever searched your name in Google Images? You can easily waste an hour searching for yourself, friends, family and colleagues, usually with an entertaining outcome. Try it now and see how you fair.

People might be concerned about high up the search results their own website is, but you need to do some SEIO, Search Engine Image Optimisation to get your good looking self up the rankings and the embarassing images down the pages.  

Actually, Google Image Search for SEIO and you can keep abreast of all the action, and SEIO Agencies could be the next big thing if you are interested in not making a right tit of yourself online.  Hope you like my made up acronym, you read it here first.

Anyway, I'm sure people search for other people before meeting them, interviewing them or even dating them. I've done it many times, even for a colleague who I was meeting once on a crowded place.

I once saw a t-shirt being sold, and guess they are all over the place now, with "you looked prettier on your MySpace [replace with social network site] page".  How true!  We're not going to put a fugly picture up now, are we.

Most tend to be (from my limited research) from; weddings, Xmas parties, birthday parties, holidays, social gatherings with friends or professional photos taken as a result of work related activities.  Notice how many have that awkwardly placed face to the edge if the photo where the ex-boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife once was, and has been cropped as harshly as the breakup.  Lots are of toned or tanned photos of ourselves in exotic locations and on holiday, parading our beauty in a peacock fashion.  As for those media headshots that are touched up and make people look as glamorous or as important as any CEO of a company, well, sign me up for one please. Haha.

When discussing this question with a colleague thus week, they mentioned a hillarious story of a co-worker. This employee had over a couple of years taken the 1st photo that was shot for their security pass and photoshoped their heads to be 15% larger. Over the years as people renewed their passes, people had grown bobbleheads without them even realising.

Now getting back on track abd the point of this blog post. My stock photo is of one from a holiday in Thailand, looking fresh faced, slightly tanned and a cheeky smile. Nothing wrong with that, but occasionally I get people say I look younger than I am. I best not ask the 'Guess your age to the nearest 5 years' man on Bournemouth beach to try his luck.

Challenge

So here's my challange to you, dear reader of this blog post.

1. Go to the About page on this site and take a look at the photo.
2. Now come back to this post and submit a comment of how many (whole) years difference you think there is between that photo and a recent one on this site.

Tip, the photo was taken in the month of December, so take a look at blog posts from last November 2009.

Good luck. I'm bit going to expose my true age, so your answer may offend or flatter me.  Either way, let me know what your social media profile photo age discrepancy is... and leave a comment below.

You can read how this started on Michael Calanan's Flickr account, and he is quite honest, giving his views, comments and updates on the site.  This user-generated commentary is great to read, as it engages the rest of the community around the issue and creates an interesting debate.

My dad, John Haysom is a very good photographer based in Dorset, and has had images even shown on the Meridian TV weather updates behind the presenters.  He recently mentioned to me someone had ripped one of his photos off his site, or one that he uploads too.  How bloody rude, even if they put a link back to his website.

So whilst this website has few images on it, mainly as I've been far to busy to get around to adding them, or have written the blog posts via my iPod Touch, I have a word of advice for advertisers;

"Don't be stealing photos off MyFaceTube, please ask for permission first and contact me.  Thank you."

You can now download apps which use Augmented Reality (AR), basically a mashup of the phones satnav, internal compass and the really cool accelerometer, which determines if the phone is facing up or down, found in the Wii controller.

By using an AR app on your iPhone, means that you could be pointing your phone at a London tourist attraction and on the screen it tells you information about it's history, admission price, opening hours or even point you in the direction of the nearest tube station when you come out.

Download the augmented reality apps such as Wikitude or Nearest Tube, and let me know how your on.

But the really exciting stuff is yet to come. We won't be saying "beam me up Scottie" just yet, but a new AR software called Layer is going to allow users to perform searches in Google, and the data is filtered and presented on the screen. A good example is looking for a decent bar late at night, and being shown where there are, how to get there, recent reviews or the cocktail menu.

At last an app that is practical and saves you time, rather than walking round in circles trying to find another pub. Better still, show me a list of pubs showing the Champions League games and serves a decent pint of Guinness.

Being a casual tweeter, I often find it's easier to write a quick <140 character update than a more deeper, or meaningful blog post. I started off tweeting with a link to a blog post I'd written merely as a traffic driver to a more lengthier piece of text. But more recently that has faded, as well as the frequency of blog posting.

I'm a very busy man. Fact. And finding the time to ramble life's experiences can be consuming. Twitter has become more of a medium to promote a rant or piece of news, interesting or not, or share a piece of the web that's either made us laugh, smile or cry. But following a bunch of people I know, it's near impossible to keep up.

I'm going to make a more concerted effort to blog more, as surprisingly I get about 20 visits a day to my site. The iPod app from WordPress is great, using as we speak, so I'll be drafting posts on the commute from now on and uploading at home.

How anyone with more than 100 friends on Twitter copes or reads all their posts, is beyond me.

It's hard enough when you have only 1 friend, and it's Tom from MySpace!

Some might have questioned the absence given that one of my last posts was about winning the national lottery twice in one night. 

Did I win the jackpot?  Well one should not share such personal information in a public domain.  However, I'd be willing to share the news that I didn't, but the winnings were well spent on a pizza.

The absence was more of a case of stop posting and see what happens.  For example, what is the site's loyalty, or level of traffic that can be achieved organically from search engines from pages that had been indexed?

I'd consistantly blogged almost every day for 2 and a half months.  Then took approximately 2 and a half months break.

The results.

January 1st to March 10th 2009

• 869 visits
• 632 unique visitors
• 1,643 page views
• 1.89 pages/visit
• 58.8% of visits from search engines (511)
• 24.05% of visits direct traffic (209)
• 17.5% of visits referring sites (149)

March 11th to May 31st 2009

• 835 visits
• 772 unique visitors
• 1,142 page views
• 1.37 pages/visit
• 84.19% of visits from search engines (703)
• 8.98% of visits referring sites (75)
• 6.83% of visits direct traffic (57)

Wow!

With some clever scripting, CSS and an objective to deliver the user to another web page on you site, rather than them hitting the back button or leaving your site completely, the 404 error page can be your saviour.

Even I've found that it can be problematic and difficult to manage all pages on your website, when you start to change pages, delete categories or tags, or incorrectly link to a page internally. Many child pages really do become orphans.

I landed on a great 404 error page today on Zopa.com, which is a financial services company dealing with loans. In fact one of the best I've seen for a few years. Shows that companies do have a sense of humour and are web savvy to address the black hole that is a 404. Try it and see for yourself.

Some websites will use the 404 to try and redirect people back to their homepage, or add a search function to the page and get the user to research for the page they were looking for. This is common if the have moved the page, likely due to a website redesign, or archiving of content.

Searching the web, a few sites tell you how to maximise this misfortune for users and turn it into an opportunity. There is even a WordPress SEO 404 plugin, that someone has built to give users a mix if content you already have on the site, that is indexed by Google.

Advertising on 404 error pages represents a great opportunity to boost website revenues.

If you could get you 404 error page sponsored, you could have a lot of fun with it. Get a brand that would be a real fit to the customers to promote themselves on the page for a fixed tenancy if you can show the reporting on your site that it makes commercial sense to the brand.

Imagine the potential revenue publishers could earn if they are seeing thousands of 404 error pages in their site analytics. Or the viral marketing it could attract, with people trying to generate a 404 page error. It would be like Google Whacking a website to see some special page with a voucher code, reward or special offer. This would then drive people back into their online shops to purchase goods.

Or if you are a media owner or an online publisher which carries advertising, why not stick some advertising on there if your site gets millions of page views. In the event that your site gets the 404 curse, you could make some cash on the back of it.

But if you don't carry advertising, and you or your company have a sense of humour, then stick something funny on the 404 error page. Make someone smile for a change, and show the web how creative you can with a page that almost everyone else seems to ignore.

After some forwarding of the old account into a Google account, it was surprising to see that people were still subscribed to the email feed, and it was still being picked up by Bloglines and Google Feedfetcher.  I think I need to do something about that site, as I've not posted for over a year.

However, it's this website I want to get sorted with FeedBurner.  Unfortunately it's not been successful in being validated and pumping out some error message of the feed being too big.  But there is quite a bit of commentary online with people using WordPress 2.7 and 2.7.1 who are getting this "Your feed filesize is larger than 512K."

Hopefully the technical support would be able to get this fixed, or respond to my posting on Google Groups.  As I want to start syndicating this blog out properly.  If you're from FeedBurner, please do me a favour and get in touch so we can fix this.

I find it astonishing how much solicited email I get. I'm not even counting the spam, so this is retail and online store newsletters, industry related emails and the odd occasional email from friends and family.

Remembering back in the days the number of emails you got was small, it was much of a novelty to get double figures of new email. These days, it's more a case of stressing about the size of your inbox, being over the corporate inbox size limit, and trying to access your email over the web or mobile.

I must find the time to do this!

Through life you meet some truly remarkable and interesting people, some from school, then through further and higher education such as college and university, and most from the working environment. Many disappear off the radar and some even reappear later in life, whether that's a good thing or bad thing I'm not sure.

Friends Reunited was the driving force behind getting people back in touch, or allowing you at a safe distance to see which is doing what. I'd given up on counting the number of people who married someone else from school and had a puppy or kitten. Sorry.

With social networking sites booming four years ago with the likes of MySpace, Bebo and then Facebook, it's become almost a popularity competition of how many friends you had. Well I gave it a given on some sites and gave up. Maybe I just don't have any.

It became too time consuming to be writing updates across multiple sites, not sure whether to upload photos or not, do I accept professional contacts or even my mum?

I have a professional profile on LinkedIn.com, which is great to network and develop my visibility, but don't welcome the weekly approaches from headhunters who haven't done their homework. It is very interesting though to see who has been looking at your profile!

The Web 2.0 may well be about social technologies, widgets, engagement with the community and the freedom of two way online communication amongst people and corporations. But getting active on your website and keeping it alive and refreshed, as well as driving traffic to it, will be crucial to making it sticky and growing. Nobody likes visiting a website that us well out if date.

Irrespective of what the Web 2.3 will mean in years to come, it brought you into this posting. You might even click on the links to other websites of people I know. The fact is, people love to read about other people. In some perverse way, it's actually quite interesting the lives that other people lead. So let me coin the phrase Web 2.3 for knowing you, knowing me.

Why not leave a comment and let me know what you think?

If I do know you, and you know me, then get in touch and you reciprocate I'll add you to the blogroll.