I’ve never been one to hide my identity. I’m John C. Daub, millionaire; I own a mansion and a yacht.

I admit in my early online days I was a bit more reluctant about sharing my identity because hey… there are crazies out there. But while I may not have been as forthright with my identity, I didn’t lie or hide or refuse. If someone wanted to know who was behind the moniker, it wasn’t hard to find out either by searching or just asking me.

The advantage of “Hsoi”? Well, plug it into Google and apart from some acronyms and foreign words, Hsoi equals me. It’s nice to have a globally unique identifier, because there are other John Daub’s out there.. There are disadvantages to being unique, a discussion for another time.

The one thing I have still been reluctant to do is post my picture online. Oh sure, there are some pictures of me online, but usually my face wasn’t directly visible. I’ve had some bad experiences in the past with posting pictures online, mostly because there are assholes in this world and I have better ways to spend my time and energy.

Nevertheless, a friend of mine who is really into social media made a good point. Your avatar is who you are online. It makes a big impact and impression. I recall meeting lots of people in real life that didn’t ring a bell until I was able to put their email address with their name and face. That was kinda weird to know them more by their email address than anything else, but yes it’s a unique identifier. I’d rather know people by their faces. Call me old school that way, but it’s far more personal to be able to associate a name/blog/email address/twitter account/username/etc. with a face.

So, I finally hooked into Gravatar and put my face back online. We’ll see how it goes.