6th
Our Kids’ Digital Futures
A friend asked me recently what she should do to secure her child’s digital future.
Here’s one thing we’ve done:
We’ve reserved our kids’ domain names (as we’ve done for our own names). So I’ve reserved “www.susandanziger.com” for myself, and I’ve done the same for each of our children (Michael, Katie, and Peter). The reason this is important is because when someone does a search on Google, it values highly whether that name is part of the domain name. So when a search is done on Peter, for instance, we know that by reserving his domain name, he’ll be able to control (or at least be in a good position to control) what’s first seen about him. Now it’s true he’s only 7 years old, but as he gets older, applies to schools, starts looking for a job or wants to make a name for himself in a particular field, people will look at his digital presence to see what he’s accomplished. We certainly wouldn’t want someone else who has a complaint about Peter (not that that would ever happen!) to be what first comes up about him on a search. This may not seem that important now, but in the future, this will be critical. I can only imagine how upset Peter would be if we didn’t reserve his name when it was still available. With Godaddy, it’s relatively inexpensive (e.g. $9.99 a year). In fact, I’ve heard of people who will check to see if the domain name is available before they name their child at birth.
Oh, and I’ve done the same with registering our kids’ names on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
