Ziki isn’t just for the French! In these times of google and everything being linked and searchable, you need to give some thought as to how your identity is represented on the Internet. Potential employers, friends, family, and the occasional stalker are all searching for you on the internet. You should be careful when posting personal information, but if you are a freelance consultant you live and die by your reputation and your name. Ziki is a handy website that allows you to aggregate all of the data you already produce into one central location. You can manage all your social network files, bookmarks, and photos. You choose what you want presented when people search for you. If you don’t want your mom to see your drunken bar photos, don’t add them to your Ziki.

Ziki offers users the ability to build their profiles using RSS feeds of content the user produces. Whenever you use a service like del.icio.us, stumbleupon, or picasa you can automatically publish that content to your Ziki profile. So now instead of 10 different profiles for different services, you’ve got a single location you can direct people to when they want to contact you.

Users may also "Tag" themselves based upon their interests. You may then network with others that have tagged themselves with similar terms. This is an interesting way to build a social network. Ziki isn’t "just another social network", its more of a place for users to have a central starting point on managing their multiple profiles.

I’ve also found that for users new to the web2.0 way of interconnecting everything, Ziki offers a starting point. You may choose from a list of supported services, and if you don’t know what they do, you can check it out and start using it.

For those concerned with identity theft and privacy, I too have wrestled with that for a long time. But honestly if they are going to get you…they will do it. Your information is already in thousands of databases, that you have no control over. You might as well set up your own database with information about yourself and control it the way you want, instead of trusting someone else with your identity management. As we users feed the system with more data, the better the system will be at delivering the content we care about.

Check out my Ziki Profile for an example of what can be done with Ziki.

I wish the best of luck to Ziki.com in their quest to Be Visible.