interaction clean up day

A few years back when I was working with CISA we came up with this strategy to “clean up the internet”. Not CISA personally – we just wanted to encourage and help business achieve it themselves. At the time (for CISA) I was interviewed on radio and there was quite a buzz. But where are we today? Not much further along it seems.

There are many reasons to clean up the Internet. Firstly, from a user’s perspective, what they find after their research is far more reliable and accurate, and secondly, from a company perspective, dollars.

Dollars. Reputation. Brand. Responsibility. Basically, it costs real money to keep files on an ISP web server. It damages your reputation and brand if your information is out of date and old. And, it’s a company’s responsibility to make sure information is accurate and not misleading! In South Australia ALONE we have 100s of websites that are sitting idle in cyberspace with information stored on them. People and companies link to these websites thinking the information is accurate and current.

So, come forward a few years – to today – and in my day job I signed the company up for google maps "all the works please". Nothing unusual in that. However, in accepting the option that photos from the web be included, we have accepted and included a photo from a CEO who is no longer with us. In fact, has not been with us for many many years.

So, hence revealed, the web’s old files and untidiness is not just on my ISP servers where I can control them. They are in cyberspace as well. Whilst this doesn’t surprise me, and there are administrative ways of sorting it out via Google (in train), it still makes the purpose of the "clean up the internet day" all the more relevant. Seriously, how often in our day to day operations do we really sit back and think “well, what’s out there?”.

This day came to being to make people think about what they had out there and what could they remove. The original intentions were to save money. You can take this much further. Go on.

xc

PS the FaceBook Event page is here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=8641539004