Whether we mean to or not, we're all acquiring online identities. Some of us do it intentionally, through Web logs or sites devoted to our businesses. Others do it without any plan, by posting comments on discussion boards, being quoted in the media or joining social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook. Pretty soon, a profile can emerge, and it might not suit the actual person.

Have you given any thought to your online identity? It's a good idea to run your name through Google just to see what comes up. You may find nothing objectionable, or you may find a comment or misprinted statement that puts you in a bad light. Such errors can often be corrected, but, depending on what they are, it can take time. Given the heavy use of search engines today, you would hate to have misinformation being dished up every time your name is mentioned.

Figures are hard to come by, but recent estimates are that as much as 30 percent of Internet searches are people-related. They are being used for many purposes, but particularly by business.

The Web is a godsend for executive recruiters: about 80 percent say they use search engines to fill in background information on job candidates. Companies routinely probe the Net to make decisions about suppliers and other resources. That means that what the Web says about you can affect how your business grows.

Wikipedia offers a glimpse of how dicey all this can be.

In one famous case, a Wikipedia article on USA Today's John Seigenthaler Sr. implicated him in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. Had Seigenthaler not come across the article, the misinformation might still be there. To its credit, Wikipedia has been addressing problems such as this and now contains an article on the Seigenthaler controversy that emerged within its pages. But like Seigenthaler, we should all be aware of what is being said about us.

Which leads me to Spock.

The new search engine (www.spock.com) responds to a perceived deficiency in Google and its ilk; namely, that searching for a name can pull up thousands of hits but no concise summary of information about the person involved.

Spock aims to remedy that by searching only for people, and merging the information it pulls into a unified user profile. You wind up with a quick list of attributes -- age, gender, occupation and so on -- along with a set of relationships to other people Spock knows about.

But what you should notice about Spock is its use of tags. When the search engine retrieves a person, it extracts phrases that appear frequently in its data and uses them as tags. This is an automated process, but in its early iterations, Spock is also set up to allow users to add tags of their own.

Hillary Clinton, for example, pops up not only with tags such as "first lady" and "United States senator," but also with less flattering terms such as "scary." Her husband's tags include both "married" and "sex scandal." George Bush's tags include "Iraq war" and "arrested for drunk driving."

Anytime people are tagged by third parties, there arises the potential for abuse. There is talk of having the system let people vote on existing tags, with the tags then being rearranged to reflect the voting results.

Clearly, tagging at Spock is a work in progress, and because the search engine is aggregating content from places such as MySpace, the database will move well beyond well known figures to include average computer users. Throw in indexing of blogs or other broadly based data sources and you can see that Spock could grow rapidly.

Having read this, you might want a little more say in your online identity. If so, consider setting up a free professional profile on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com). This fast-growing networking site has been adding 120,000 members a week, now totaling about 10 million. This is not MySpace -- the focus is recruiting, sales, investment and the creation of trust among users who invite colleagues and associates to become part of a widening personal network.

Set up a profile on LinkedIn and select the "full view" feature, which will allow search engines to find the maximum amount of information about you. Not only is your profile under your control, but also you have the ability to invite people to join you in the service, which opens access to their own set of invited connections. This is people-finding in a controlled and carefully managed context, one reason that LinkedIn has been showing such phenomenal growth rates.

It's important to think in terms of how an online identity can benefit you, rather than simply reacting to what others are saying about you.

Another service to consider is ZoomInfo (www.zoominfo.com), which also allows free profiles and is explicitly set up as a business-related search engine, now profiling more than 36 million people. Tools such as these can help you manage how you are presented in an increasingly significant online marketplace.

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