Webcomics from Agent-X Comics

Your true profile

Your true profile published on 3 Comments on Your true profile

Most employers check out potential new hires on facebook these days.

According to CareerBuilder.co.uk, more than half (53%) of employers research potential job candidates on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
The days of simply relying on the candidates CV and what their referees say, is long gone.
Our ability to easily upload content to the internet from anywhere means that future employers will be tempted to look for this content in order to better understand what you may be really like.

They want to confirm that what you have on your CV is factual, and that you are not a secret sociopath who may cause damage to the company in the future. Also, human nature being what it is, they just want to know stuff about you.

A decent percentage of employers do admit to finding out items online, which has persuaded them to not hire a candidate.
For example,  this article discusses a female psychiatrist being passed over for a role, due to pictures posted on facebook.

And it does not end at getting the job.
As I have blogged about before, you can get “facebook fired” ifyou decide to post negative comments about fellow workers or the company that employs you.

The rise of activity like this has led to companies such as Reputationdefender.com, and many others, springing up. Reputationdefender.com offers to monitor your Web reputation for $10 USD a month, plus a one-time fee of $30 USD to remove something from the internet, if an unwanted item somehow gets out of control.
This is a good service and may be very useful to some people.

I still believe that the simplest course of action to defend your reputation, is simply to use your common sense.
If that fails, then here are some quick tips to keep in mind:

  • IF you want to post suspect comments, blogs or pictures, then make sure of your privacy settings first.
  • BEFORE you add work colleagues as facebook friends, set up a group with limited privacy settings, and add them to that group. Then (if you need to) you can post things that they do not have permissions to  view.
  • IF you must post a suspect/spicey/goatse  image online, try using an anonymous image loader, such as imgur.com.
    Then, the image url cannot be traced back to you.
  • PRIVATE twitter accounts are easy to set up. Use one if you want to tweet & share privately. Just lock the account and off you go.
  • ADULT dating sites don’t always need your face in the picture. However, you still need to use your head when using them.
  • COMMUNITIES can be forgiving or they can turn on you. THINK before you post.
  • When something gets posted online, it can remain there FOREVER. Even if you try to delete it. There are backups, copies and caches to make sure nothing is lost.
    (Although Twitter now removes deleted tweets from searches, some services such as Friendfeed,or clients such as Tweetdeck, can retain these tweets.)
  • RESPECT other people’s content and be aware that if you post or share their content it might breach copyright laws. For example, a photo that your friend took is their property, not yours. You can only post it online if you have their permission.

If you want to do well on the internet, I actually advise you to adopt a paranoid mindset, so that you will THINK BEFORE YOU POST. This will help make your online life much easier to enjoy.

 

Replacement

Replacement published on 5 Comments on Replacement

Don’t you hate it when you get your computer JUST right, and then you have to upgrade it?

I hope that in the future, when we change over to a new model, someone will have created a way to instantly copy over all of our personal settings, installed programs and the placement of our desktop icons.
The person that can create that will have, in my opinion, delivered the most valuable gift to human kind since computers were invented.

It is a very short post accompanying the comic this week, as I have been at  Supanova, meeting & talking with some awesome comic creators and I am pretty tired out. I also have a heap of comics to read, which I better get stuck into really soon.
I will also be doing some blog posts about the things I got up to, and my impressions of the Supanova event, over the coming days.
In case it matters, those posts will pretty much be a cosplay free zone, so stay tuned, if that sounds good to you.

 

Social Mafia

Social Mafia published on No Comments on Social Mafia

Who is in your social media ‘family’?

It is inevitable that anything humans create, that allow us to connect to other people or share information, will eventually be used for two things.
Porn is normally the first thing that new networks are used for. This internet is rife with it, after all.

And next comes criminal activity, which takes advantage of the ability to connect to people, in order to extend the numbers of people they can easily reach.
The level of the criminal activity varies, from full blown organised crime syndicates that can bilk people for thousands of dollars, to local thieves using Foursquare to find when victims homes are empty, and right down to cyber-bullying.

It almost seems inevitable that something which is created with the intention of being used for good, will somehow be used to promote negative behaviour.
We even have a category for people who perform all of their criminal behaviour online – Cyber Criminals.

Nothing on the internet, or mobile devices, is excluded from the reach of those that want to use technology to commit criminal acts.
Sometimes the people doing this may not even be aware that what they are doing is criminal.
Cyber-bullying, for example, is on the increase and it is only in the recent past that cyber-bullies have been charged for their actions.

Another very common activity that can be a criminal activity is peer-to-peer file sharing. (Of course, this really depends on what you are sharing, and with whom.) But the act of sharing files on line is so common now that many users do not stop to consider if they are breaching copyright laws.

Similarly, sharing and re-posting images that are found online, is an extremely common activity,which many people simply do not think twice about when they copy an image from a website.
There are users that will actually argue that images/art/comics/videos, become public property as soon as they are published online.
Therefore, taking them to use for your own purposes is totally fine and is actually what the creator intended.
This is, of course, just not true and often the theft of creative pieces can have a very detrimental effect on those creators.
Sometimes, it can even result in those creators never making anything again.

So next time you are going to repost a comic,video or photo, take a few seconds to include a link back to the creator of the piece.
You don’t have to buy their stuff unless you really like what they are doing. (But this DOES help them to make more of what you like)
As long as you at least show the location of where you found what you are re-posting, then that is all we can ask for.

So, please remember – Link back so there will more in the future.

 

 


Cheaper date

Cheaper date published on 2 Comments on Cheaper date

Man! You can get Groupon vouchers for pretty much anything these days….

If you have not heard of Groupon, then you are either living in a box under the stairs, or you have simply heard of one of their competitors instead.
(And a big “Hello!” to all my readers who ARE living in a box under the stairs. I think it is most of you)

Groupon is one of the original websites that offer users discounts on goods & services, via the power of group buying. Users can only purchase the discount vouchers during a limited period of time, otherwise they may miss out forever.
Groupon has now expanded globally, and has been so successful, that there (are at last count) around 264 competitors to them, in the USA alone.  These competitors have all started within the past 3 years.

In an effort to standout, many of these group buying discount sites has chosen to focus on niche products, such as beauty, fashion, alcohol or music.

If you look hard enough, you can find almost anything on one of these discount sites.
Some of the strangest ones I have found are:

> Save 20% at Museum of Sex

> Royal Wedding tickets at half price

> 85% off a tattoo

> 71% off plastic surgery

What weird stuff have you seen out there?

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