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under this licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en_GB
Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost continue their Hackademic series with a new set of hints, tips and hacks focused on academic networking.
BUY A DOMAIN NAME. This is relatively simple. If you don’t own your own domain, buy it now. You don’t necessarily even need server space or a website to put up. In lieu of anything more elaborate, simply forward your domain to your work profile or Academia.edu page. Eventually you might build a blog or substantial website and use the domain for that. The point is to start laying claim to your online identity. You’ll be glad you did as your career grows, because you’ll have an easy-to-find web presence with some history that will help your work show up in google searches.
MartiC said on February 6, 2014
I have gotten this advice before and actually investigated it, but was stymied by trying to decide what kind of domain I should get .com, .org, .net, something else?? I know ideally I should probably get them all, but if I were only going to get one which should it be?
Chris Shaw said on February 19, 2014
The additional advantage is providing you with a professional email address. Think of the last journal article you read, where the author’s contact email wasn’t with a professional institution (.edu, .ac.uk etc). It was probably some wierd auto-assigned thing from gmail (other email providers are available!) – likely with a string of numbers in that no-one will easily remember. Or worse still, some random in-joke name from your college years that does nothing for your professional credibility now.
The further & ongoing career advantage of a permanent domain & email, is it won’t change when you move house, change ISP or cellular provider etc.
MartiC – I went with .NET, but only because that was the only permutation of my name that hadn’t already been taken.