I'd be skeptical of someone, especially in IT, who has no online presence. I believe it is good to build up a brand around your name on the internet. You should be in control of what potential future employers see when they Google you. It is better for you to be in the top spot for your name then someone else talking about you, or something with the same name.

When I first joined the internet, I asked my parents if I could have a website on Geocities. They said no. I didn't listen and went behind their back to create it. I didn't have any info besides my first name, so there was no real harm (and I was smart enough not to meet up alone with random strangers, not that I was ever propositioned).

In 2001 I bought a domain named after me and blogged on it (although, it took years for me to admit it was a blog, since those had a bad stigma attached :) ). More recently I've posted the occasional technical entry. Because of this I've been cold called (well, e-mailed) from major companies asking if I want to interview.

It is 2009, nearly everyone has some sort of online presence now. It is unlikely you'll be targeted just for having your name out there. It is much more likely bad things will happen when a company you deal with is hacked and your information is stolen that way. Plus, you can use your presence as a defense. If I wasn't the top result on Google for my name, people might think I was an anti-semite author.

Andrew Hitchcock

This isn't Wikipedia, we call them "KB" here. Thanks.

I pay income tax, but barely ever use freeways (mainly when I'm on the bus). Why should I subsidize your use of the roads? Also, congestion tolling makes the roads more efficient and keeps the average speed higher.

When you draw the internet while diagramming on a whiteboard, what do you draw? Most people draw a cloud as an abstraction for the stuff "out there". I've never seen anyone draw a spiderweb when drawing a diagram that includes the internet.

I've tried to explain the cloud to slashdotters before. If you don't like the word cloud, you don't have to call it that. A less buzzword-y and perhaps more accurate term would be "utility computing". Turn on the faucet and out comes your data.

Yeah, I noticed that this morning when I read about the investment. They closed a bunch of older facilities in Asia, laying off the workers, and are building the new fancy fabs in the US (and creating high paying jobs in the process).

Of course, the next thing that came to my mind is whether Slashdot would cover that aspect of the story. Sure enough, Slashdot's summary completely disregards that Intel is creating jobs in America. I suspect there are two reasons for this: 1. It hurts Slashdot's agenda if they report about companies insourcing, readers should only know about outsourcing by "the evil corporations". 2. Because Intel is the big bad wolf and we can't report anything good they do.