You wont need all of that anymore. I have recently come across a website that allows anyone to hunt for personal information at a single click. The website hosts a free to use service which gives information about any person just on the basis of “firstname lastname” and results in presenting a whole load of information containing photographs, email addresses, youtube videos, biographies, books, blogs, news articles, IMs and even social networking profiles including Facebook, myspace, Twitter, Linkedin and many more… The search results are aggregated from a plethora of common and uncommon search engines, social networking sites, blogs, news channels, ecommerce websites, photo album websites such as Flickr and Picasa and hundreds of other websites that you wouldnt have even heard of.

The website is 123people.co.uk. This afternoon, I tried putting in my own name and I was shocked to see quite a lot of my own information being presented on a single page. I would recommend that you search yours and check if your information is being correctly displayed?

If the website shows your accurate information as results, don’t blame your parents and complain about your unique name. The results you see on 123people.co.uk are fruits of your activities that have created information on the web which is now aggregated for anyone to spy on you. If you see too much information being displayed and would like to get rid of it, think about changing privacy settings of websites that are contributing to your information being displayed.

Just to let to know, several web ecologists at WebCoherence are working on finding solutions to these problems of personal identity management on the web. If you are willing to participate and contribute in our solution finding exercise, please write to us at webcoherence [at] gmail [dot] com.

In the meanwhile, please do leave in your comments and suggestions based on your findings and experiences. This will help us in our research.

I attended a public guest lecture by Prof. Manuel Castells at the LSE last month where he introduced us with his new research and book titled Communication Power. He pointed out during his speech that the Green agenda has been here for over 30 long years! Indeed we all know that cutting trees or burning coal is detrimental to the environment but the reason why we see enhanced awareness in recent times is attributed to the power of Internet.

According to Professor Castells, it’s the Internet enabled Communication and Networked Power that has helped spread the message far and loud which has created waves of awareness and has enabled society at large to consider the issue which has been ignored for the past three decades. Companies now publish their sustainability reports on the web which are picked up by the common man and evaluated of its merit.  The pressure of open evaluation is playing an important role (though it is NOT the only influencing factor) in helping us go green.  It still remains a question if the reports display accurate carbon metrics, but it can safely be predicted that - though some of the figures on sustainability reports might have be extrapolated or incorrectly calculated, there are definitely some efforts being put by organisations to go green and the networked power of the Internet has an overall positive impact on the environment.