Noah Barron posed this question to journalists at OJR the other day:

Should we use the self-reported details that people–most often young people–post on their own social networking sites for journalistic articles?

He even answers his own question:

As a reporter, there must be special caution with regards to behavior and statements made on the Web. The Internet is still a realm of pseudo-behavior, where the stealing of music files seems categorically different to some than the stealing of a CD from a retail store.

Let’s ignore the misconception that copyright infringement is stealing (when it is technically copying) for a second and focus Noah’s original argument: That journalists must use special caution when reporting on “pseudo-behavior.”

I touched a bit on keeping virtual personalities separate in my last post. Even though I tend to keep all of my profiles as open to the public as the application allows, I still focus my content on those networks to the audience on that network. I’m famous to 15 people with each of those applications, to turn Warhol’s phrase for my own purposes.

Sure, my mother-in-law, feeling snoopy, could sign up for a Facebook account and try to spy on me. For quite some time, employers searching the Internet for prospective employees has been all the rage in the news media. But, that doesn’t mean what I put on those networks isn’t me.

When you hang out with your more-apt-to-party friends and they convince you to get naked and run around your house while singing the National Anthem in falsetto, that’s a behavior you wouldn’t just up and do at grandma’s house or work. See, like advertising on the Internet, it’s all about context, baby! Simply because you feel comfortable swearing at your siblings, but not your parents, doesn’t necessarily mean swearing is “pseudo-behavior.”

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I’ve learned something this week. Profile aggregators are a pain. All of them.

I went through these profile aggregators:

claimID
Explode
FindMeOn
Iceflake
Lijit
Metathings
Mugshot
Naymz
onXiam
Opinity
Ozmozr
Profilactic
ProfileFly
ProfileLinker

At best they’re simple bookmark lists sitting on a Web page. At worst, they’re needless headaches. Most of them are useless, many of them don’t work as advertised and half of them are bad copies of another aggregator on the list.

It’s easier to share videos with youtube. It’s easier to stay in touch with colleagues and classmates with linkedIn and Facebook respectively. It’s easier to share photos with the world on flickr. Great! I love applications that do those things and do them well. But copy cats are starting to annoy the crap out of me.

I’m seriously wondering if there’s even a reason to aggregate the content I create into one place. The great thing about Web 2.0 isn’t that it’s all about me. It’s that it’s all about my content. With all these fancy social applications, I can target my content to people I want to target it at.

My professional network on LinkedIn doesn’t need to see photos of me hanging out at a bar with friends. My family, whom I share photos with on flickr, doesn’t need to read my wall at Facebook. Hell, they don’t even need to know I have a facebook to begin with.

Separation is, in fact, a good thing.