Remember that potential employers are likely to throw your name into a search engine before making any contact to do a background check. You’ll often find your name and details coming up on University alumni websites, articles about conferences you may have been to and so on, but these are normally harmless and give away little personal information.

However, it is most important to be careful with the information on your social networking websites, such as Facebook and Bebo, as these can also been seen by potential employers. Embarassing photos, posts, even quiz results can be incriminating and can affect a potential employers impression of you – and could even cause them to leave you out of their candidates.

Make sure all of your pages are private and only viewable to friends. Remember that you never can be too careful online – your friends could potentially link to a photo of you on a wild night out from your page onto their page, which may not be private, and open to search engines. When job hunting and reviewing the content on your social network pages, if in doubt, take it out!

Image from Flickr.

This site generates “word clouds” from text that you provide, with the clouds cleverly giving greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes, and the images you create are yours to use however you like. You can even save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your geekiest friends.

This is the word cloud we created linking to this very blog!

And Webstock 2010 is set to offer one of the conference’s most exciting lineups yet, with industry experts, legends and up-and-coming movers and shakers aplenty offering the best presentations, workshops and insights into what’s new and exciting in the industry.

Webstock aims to have their attendees return to their places of work more energised, more knowledgable and more connected. These are some of the conference presentations we’re most excited about:

• Jeff Veen  :  How the Web Works

• Lisa Herrod  :  Designing for Diversity – Inclusive Design and the User Experience

• John Resig  :  Practical Mobile JavaScript Development

• Toby Segaran  :  Beautiful Data

• Ben Cerveny  :  Off the Grid: New Models for Designing Games, Products, and Places

• Jeff Atwood  :  Stack Overflow: Building Social Software for the Anti-Social

• Eric Ries  :  The Lean Startup

• Amy Hoy  :  Shift+Cmd+R: Hard Refresh Your Design

• Daniel Burka  :  Iterative Design Strategies

• Thomas Fuchas  :  I Can’t Believe It’s Not Flash!

Webstock is running February 15-19 in Wellington. NZS.com GM Gary Jensen will be attending, so if you see him on tha day be sure to stop and say hi. For more information, including 10 Reasons You Should Attend, check out the Webstock website.

A friend of NZS.com gave us a heads up about Firefox Personas this morning. These easy-to-use themes let you personalise the look of your Firefox browser, and with thousands of Personas to choose from (and more added every day) you’re able to match your browser to your mood.

Personas are easy-to-install, and if you have the design bug you can even create your own persona using your favorite graphics editing programs such as Photoshop.

Firstly, you need quality content to assure your visitors and potential customers that you are legitimate and offer the perfect services to meet their needs. Secondly, good website content is the backbone of search engine optimisation. Which is equally important if you’re to have any chance of ranking in search engines and gaining genuine traffic.

Though innovative and eye catching design may impress potential clients, it’s relevant, well written content that is really the heart and soul of your website. It is that content that will ultimately drive visitors to your site, capture their attention and keep them wanting more. In short: great website content is the best relationship building tool you can have with your customers.

Think of your website as a cake. You nip into a bakery to buy a delicious cake to share with your customers. You spy the most delectable, and expensive, cake in the store, but the moment you taste a slice you realise the baker has forgotten to add sugar. Now the cake is bland and boring and hard to swallow… and your customers are less than impressed and losing interest.

Think of web content as the sugar that needs to be added to your cake. While great design may make your website look professional, without quality content you’ll find customers are not satisfied and soon lose interest.

A well designed website can attract visitors to your website, but website content is the key element that will bring regular traffic, persuade your visitors to take an action and convert visitors into sales.

For more information on creating quality content and search engine optimisation be sure to check out our Website Resources on NZS.com.

From animation to graphic design and video production, there are a wide range of exciting and innovative design courses available in New Zealand for those aspiring design stars seeking creative jobs in the multimedia industries.

Whether you choose a design certificate in interactive media or a web design course, studying any kind of design diploma or course at your own pace, and being inspired at a quality design college in New Zealand, is the best way to get on the fast track to an exciting design career.

From spam to phishing, email scams to Trojan horses, New Zealanders are growing increasingly weary of the implications of the technologies we are so reliant upon – and in many ways rightly so. Particularly when our privacy – and our very identities – are potential at risk.

These concerns have been highlighted by a spike in the number of complaints made by techno-loving Kiwis to the Privacy Commission.

In her yearly report commissioner Marie Shroff has said the Privacy Commission received more than 6000 enquiries on personal information and privacy matters in the year leading up to June. This number was the highest number of enquiries since 2002, and up by more than 1200 between 2007 and 2008.

The subjects more queried included Google products and platforms such as Street View, the increase and sophistication of CCTV, social networking sites such as Facebook, and data security issues.

The widespread use of portable storage devices (PSDs) such as USB memory sticks, netbooks and iPhones has also raised issues about the security of our data.

Survey findings released by the commission earlier this year found that flagship government departments were among those most at risk of disclosing sensitive personal material, due to lax controls over PSDs.

Ms Shroff said the world was in the midst of an information revolution, where details about individuals could be collected, used and disclosed on an unprecedented scale.

She believed that personal information about New Zealanders was not being treated with the same care and respect as other sorts of ‘classified’ or ‘sensitive’ information. She also urged middle and senior public sector managers to become more focused on data protection.

The Law Commission’s major review of privacy was continuing, with the spotlight moving on to the Privacy Act itself.

You can view the Privacy Commissioner Annual Report 2009 (PDF) in full here.

If you’re in need of VoIP phone and telecommunications solutions why not check out the services on offer from Netfone? And if you’re swamped with phone calls from all the new business you’re getting, you might want to invest in some of the digital transcription and administration services on offer from Adept.

Business solutions are a valuable investment, so you’ll also be wanting to ensure your company security leading up to a brand new year. Whether you’re after CCTV camera surveillance or access control, Vision Systems can lend a hand.

Want to escape the rat race, work from home and earn an income online? Technology 21 can help you make it happen with their exciting sports software. And if you do decide to become your own boss you’ll be needing to pay extra attention to your health and wellbeing. For a great selection of NZ health products to keep you working and playing at your best check out NZpurehealth.

Earlier this month, Orcon announced the launch of a cloud computing service for small to medium businesses, claiming it was the first locally developed service in the New Zealand.

Cloud computing or hosting refers to scalable and virtual web hosting options, where servers, including virtual servers, were created and used ‘on demand’. This allowed customers the freedom to pay only for what they used, with added data storage capable of being added without needing new computer infrastructure.

Iconz chief executive Sean McDonald disputed Orcon’s claims and said his company entered the market in October 2008. Iconz did not specifically offer ‘cloud’ computing, but Mr McDonald said the service it provided was essentially the same thing.

He said ‘cloud’ computing or hosting was one of the buzz phrases currently receiving industry hype, but could be misinterpreted. He believed that one of the problems was that anyone with a reasonable size server could state they were a cloud provider.

Xero founder Rod Drury said local cloud services had been available in New Zealand since around 2000 from companies including Datacom and Abacom. He believed the trend would become more mainstream as broadband continued to develop and improve, but conceded the use of the term was also “probably a bit of cheeky marketing”.

Orcon spokesman Duncan Blair said the company was standing by claims and the definition of cloud computing as ‘dynamically scalable and virtual servers’.

With Google Chrome themes from designers like Anna Sui, Donna Karen and Kate Spade (pictured), as well as a range of cool cartoon and pop culture inspired motifs to choose from, you can be sure your Chrome browser will never look less then geek-a-liciously gorgeous again.

Google Chrome is currently only for Windows Vista/XP SP3 users. A Mac-friendly version is said to be on the way.