Keeping multiple personas separate with virtualization

At one point or another, it's not unusual to create a separate Internet persona for yourself that is not obviously tied to your normal/regular/real persona. There are various reasons for doing this, some more legitimate than others. An example of a legitimate need for a persona would be to blog about something controversial. Actually, it doesn't even have to be controversial. Remember, these are the days when potential employers and customers will not hesitate to Google you in order to figure out what kind of person you are. Or maybe you want to use a somewhat dubious traffic generation method like Tag And Ping to make some money. Or maybe you have multiple AdSense accounts (it's possible if you use separate legal entities) and hate logging in and out of the accounts to check your earnings.

Creating a persona used to be as simple as just getting an email address from one of the free mail services like GMail. But a new email account doesn't cut it anymore, not if you want to use social networking sites and the like along with browser extensions and other tools. You have to remember to login to the right account on the appropriate service. Develop several personas and it can get quite confusing.

An easy way to avoid persona confusion is to use virtualization software. Virtualization software lets you run an operating system — Windows, Linux, whatever — inside a “virtual” computer that runs as software on your own computer. Software developers like myself have long used virtualization for testing and development, because it lets you test on “clean” environments and also avoids having to install buggy software on your own precious computer.

The neat thing about virtualization is that it's now free. You can download and install VMWare and get a free operating system like Linux up and running pretty quickly. Developers like myself used to pay big bucks for this capability, but now it's available to anyone.

The idea is simple, really: use a separate virtual machine for each alternate persona you have. Install Firefox in each one. Install a mail client like Thunderbird as well. Configure the browser and mail reader appropriately for the new persona, including installing the appropriate extensions for tagging and so on. You can even use different desktop background colors to remind yourself which persona you're dealing with.

Then whenever you want to tag something or post a new blog entry, do it from the persona's dedicated virtual machine. Your persona will stay logged on to the different services you use, no need to sign in and out.

Virtualization is not the only way to keep multiple identities separate, and it takes some setup work, but I think in the end it may be the cleanest way to go, because it will definitely keep your identities from accidentally mingling. It's also portable — you can put virtual machine sessions on an external hard drive and take them with you wherever you go.

Not everyone needs separate personas. And there are other things you need to do to protect your privacy, such as registering domain names with privacy enabled (I use 1&1 personally, by the way, partly because they offer the privacy for free, which means I can register a .com domain name with privacy for only $5.99, which is not a bad deal at all) and not being too liberal with your mailing address and phone number. But it's not a bad solution for those of us with split personalities.

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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

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