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Pop a squat on your online identity
Owning your identity online — whether you are an organization or individual — is very important. Although I am not a fan of domain squatting, I do think you should squat on your “brand.”
Why should you care?
Simply because, right or wrong, just about everything done online with your name will be associated with you. Owning your name across multiple domains and spaces keeps those with malicious intents from inflicting damage to your brand. (Or, if you’re someone like John Smith, you’re pretty much already screwed.) There’s a reason why many companies own a version of their domain with a sucks.com at the end.
Brand can mean a lot of things, from simply your name (Nick Gehring) to your identity (mine1044, my longtime AIM name and otherwise being online pseudonym.) It’s a daunting task to keep track of the many, many places where “you” could exist. Usernamecheck helps a little by scanning to see if your name has been registered with a laundry list of sites.
But there are other places to check. How well do you rank in a basic Yahoo or Google search? Sounds like you need to register yourname.com, if you haven’t already, and get to some search engine optimization. If you’re any kind of serious Web professional, or an overprotective parent, getting your name is a no-brainer.
Creating a basic Wikipedia entry for your company is also a no-brainer, assuming, well, that your company is big enough or important enough to be worthy of a Wikipedia entry. Oh, and don’t forget to check back on the page! You can never be sure what some miscreant will edit into it.