Ciaran McNulty

One of the emergent web technologies I'm very interested in is the Microformats project, a set of ways of making data embedded in HTML documents machie-readable.

Two of the most widely adopted Microformats are hCard and XFN.

hCard is a standardised method for marking up contact data. the point of it is that if all sites mark up contact data the same way, it's easier to parse.

XFN is all about the relationships between sites, and one of its key features is that it allows you to identify that a set of online profiles all belong to the same person (if they've voluntarily linked them).

I thought I'd take a survey of the data about me that's available publically online and exposed via these two formats:

hCard Field	Value	Source
Nickname	ciaranmcnulty	LiveJournal, YouTube, Twitter
	CiaranJMcNulty	Flickr
Full name	Ciaran McNulty	CiaranMcNulty.com, Flickr, Last.fm, Facebook, LinkedIn
	CiaranMcNulty	YouTube, Twitter
Given name	Ciaran	CiaranMcNulty.com, Flickr, Last.fm, Facebook, LinkedIn
Family name	McNulty	CiaranMcNulty.com, Flickr, Last.fm, Facebook, LinkedIn
Email	mail@ciaranmcnulty.com	CiaranMcNulty.com
	mail [at] ciaranmcnulty.com	Flickr
Address	United Kingdom	Last.fm
	London, United Kingdom	LinkedIn
Tel	+447092305237	CiaranMcNulty.com
Photo		LiveJournal
		Last.fm
		Facebook
		YouTube
Logo		Flickr

Taken as an aggregated whole, there's a fairly complete set of contact details out there! Personally I don't mind all of this information being out there, but I know a lot of people who would be horrified if they realised how much was already exposed to search engines and other spiders.

What interests me is that all this data is already out there in the wild for a lot of us, it's just not previously been machine-readable. What's also important to realise is that in today's world of web archives and Google caches, once data is public it's pretty much going to be available forever. A lot of us provide data to websites without really thinking about how that data will be displayed and used in future.

As more and more of our lives are lived online, we're all going to leave trails like this and will have to start thinking about how to manage it.

One solution is to maintain more than one identity. XFN allows identities to be consolidated together, but there's no reason they have to be. If I wanted to, for instance, I could break the XFN links to and from my Flickr account and essentially keep that identity separate in a machine-readable sense. The use of pseudonyms would come in handy here, for people with less distinctive names.

One way or another though, you need to take the time to think about what you're typing into that registration form, and whether you're happy having it online.