Geologists distinguishing era (several hundred million years) from epoch (tens of millions of years) in scaling the history of our planet over time. Some theorists speculate that the Earth was more or less a large ocean or seascape out of which gigantic land masses emerged to form the more familiar landscape we see today. Similarly, the digital seascape in the early 1960's was in large part, a single primitive ocean of email. Over the next twenty years, until the early 1990's, islands of specialized technology or protocols emerged from the digital sea (AKA the Matrix) as distinct yet virtual text-based worlds such as Gopherspace, VERONICA, and WAIS. After 1989, one digital land mass, originally and somewhat audaciously referred to at the time as the World Wide Web, rose up to dominant and define our digital landscape. Today, no matter where we are on the surface of the Earth, we call it simply the Web or the Net. It has now so dominated our digital perspective and our collective psyche that we use it to "scale" Internet Time as Web 1.0, Web 2.0, etc.

Our digital world has radically changed as communication channels, the virtual pipes of the Internet, have expanded in capacity from dialup to broadband and as virtual consoles have improved from text-based Lynx to the most recent release, Chrome. Internet history is interesting but regretably less relevant these days because Internet Time literally runs at the speed of light, around the earth, 24 hours by 7 days a week, as long as electricity flows through the matrix. The message associated with your online presence is potentially accessible to hundreds if not thousands of people somewhere in our Village every minute of our 24-hour cycle. The business value of a Web 2.0 online presence is very different from the static electronic brochure used 30 years ago. Our abilities to leverage the value of our virtual real estate has grown exponentially in terms of our mission (retail, content provider, a simple Contact Us message), our intended audience or targeted markets (flavors), our "techie" appeal (text, Flash graphics, video, podcast), and our content (original and proprietary information to window-scraped SPAM).

When you first consider an online presence, if you run your life like a home-based business and, for example, following a mission plan, you need to begin with some form of self-identification (the Who are you?) If not self -promotion (the What are you about?). Without an email address and even a simple online presence in say, MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn, you are not really a part of the Net because you are not an accessible and recognizable netizen; you are, at best, an anonymous "lurker". An online presence like a MySpace or Facebook page has come to rival the importance of a phone number and a physical mailing address. But is an online presence appropriate for everyone? The simple answer is yes. However, you need to approach your published biographical information from a serious point of view. You need to care about the content that is made public because the Net never goals.

Formulate a clear idea of ??who you are, where you are going, and what you want to accomplish and show it in your profile. When you start a business, for example, you typically write a business plan that includes a mission statement, operational plan, and, among other things, a marketing plan. It makes no difference whatever you have a career, a job or building a future foundation. You need to write down your goals and describe possible paths to achieve them. A mission statement outlines WHAT goals you set and oftentimes, WHY you believe you will achieve them. The WHY includes personal core competencies that your "life enterprise" offers a spouse, friends, clients, or the entire Global Village. You define your "line of business" (LOB) as the operational areas critical to and necessary for running your "life enterprise". These areas are a great source of content information. An operational plan describes how the operational parts of your "enterprise engine" will work together. Oftentimes, engines run even with broken parts. Without fuel however, an enterprise engine is just a pile of virtual junk metal, fluid, cable, and rubber. A marketing plan describes HOW you intend to fuel your engine or, in other words, how you will earn a living! Without a marketing plan, there is nothing to power your "business". So, your mission statement provides a general goal in your business or your life. Your operational plan details to you and others the steering directions; how you intend to get where you want to go. LOB areas describe inter-related "parts" of your "engine"; your areas of skill and expertise. Finally, your marketing plan describes the source of the fuel that will make your engine and your life move forward towards whatever mission (s) you choose in your life. Consider your online presence as a reflection of all these components.

Everyone can and should identify and promote themselves because they collectively form the major in our Global Village. They formulates opinions and make decisions according to their own goals, their own areas of competency, and personal "action plans". They consume information, services, and products and then they can make a judgment of value and worth. With the advent of Web 2.0, people can easily share their views with others of similar mind. Consider your online presence as furnishing credibility to what you say. If you have specialized in some area or product, let other netizens know it. I remind my clients that "merchants" among us who have no online presence will especially have little professional jurisdiction to their fellow netizens nor be of much service in the long run to themselves. The world, our culture, and even the concepts of time have changed. The Web 2.0 digital culture has empowered the people fortunate enough to communicate through it. It has changed the way we view ourselves, our fellow netizens, and both the real and virtual world as we know it.