Before we begin discussing how to set up a MySpace personal profile, let’s look into the MySpace phenomenon.  Founded in Santa Monica, California, and currently owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, also owner of Fox Network, MySpace is a free service that requires only access to the Internet.  It makes its money via advertising seen throughout the website’s many pages.  It has become the place to be for many chic twenty-somethings as well as musicians, comedians, and filmmakers looking for a new way to share their work.  Once you get involved, you’ll find many, many opportunities to become connected to many, many different types of people.  And, you personal profile is the place you’ll start.  Don’t worry about doing too much to start—you’ll get plenty of ideas for your profile by visiting others’ profiles.

Your MySpace profile consists of a number of different sections.  Your profile will start with two standard “blurbs.”  One is titled “About Me” and the other is called “Who I’d Like to Meet.”  There is also a section for you to write about or list your interests as well as specific details about you.  You need not fill in all of these sections; any fields that you do not fill in will not be displayed.  Your profile will also contain a “blog.”  In your blog, you will find default fields for content, emotion, and media.  Here, you can also upload photographs.  You will choose one of your photos to be your default image, which will appear on your profile’s main page, the site’s search page, and next to your name on comments you make and messages you send.  You can also upload video to your profile.

Once you’ve set up your personal profile, your next step is to spend some time on your Friend Space.   Your Friend Space contains a count of your friends, a special “Top Friends” section, and a link to view all of your friends.  You can choose to display a certain number of friends on your own profile, in the Top Friends area.  You can choose to display 4, 8, 12, 16, 20 or 24 friends in your Top Friends area.

Below your Friend Space, you will find a Comments section.  Here, your friends can leave comments for all MySpace viewers to read.  You have the ability to delete any comments posted to your Comments section, or you may opt to approve all comments before they are posted to your profile.

You can also personalize your personal profile if you know how to use HTML/XTML or CSS. Just about anything on the profile page can be modified.  You can also add embedded music to your profile using MySpace Music, a service that many bands use to post their songs onto their profiles.  Video and other flash-based media can also be added.  If you don’t know how to write code in HTML/XTML or CSS, a number of websites are available to do it for you.

Your MySpace profiling from start to finish can take as much or as little time as you are prepared to put in.  A simple profile can be set up easily in minutes.  You can then add to your profile as you become more comfortable with the service.

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More and more it is becoming commonplace for potential employers across the country to do a search over the Internet and in particular to take a look at online communities that are there for the purposes of social networking to see if they can find out as much as possible about individuals who come to them looking for employment. While this may seem deceptive and underhanded, the Internet is there for the use of anyone who wishes to use it and therefore it is well within an employer’s rights to do some checking on any given person. It is quite possible that one of these sites could yield information that turns the employer against a given candidate and makes a job offer extremely unlikely.  Canada and the UK are quickly catching onto this concept and are following in the footsteps of the United States in doing searches for prospective employees.
According to article that recently was published in Business Week, “Googling” people is fast becoming a way for bosses and headhunters to do continuous and stealthy background checks on employees, no disclosure required. There are becoming more and more real life examples of talented job hunters that were passed over for jobs because they chose to reveal too much about their lives over the Internet.

It is important to consider how you wish to be viewed by a potential employer down the line. This means that even if you are presently in middle school or high school you want to be careful that nothing you do now via the Internet will come back to haunt you later on. Finding a good job is difficult enough without having damaging pieces of information about yourself spread across the Internet for anyone to read. Be aware too that deleting information at some sites is not as easy as you might think it would be.

Look cryptically at your online profile and if there are things there that you are embarrassed or ashamed of then remove them immediately! Whether it is swear words, raunchy information or photos that you do not wish those seeking you out in a professional manner to become aware of, remove them or better yet do not include such things in your profile. Make sure that your friends at MySpace do not have anything offensive or embarrassing at their profiles about you or you just might be kissing an excellent job offer goodbye in the near or distant future!

Many people believe that employers who troll the Internet for personal information about potential employees or personal employees are discriminating against them but be aware that even the things you do in your personal life and spare time provide clues to your personality and your character. It probably is not fair but remember that nobody forced you to post certain personal things about your life at MySpace. You chose to do that by yourself.

It is important to use your discretion when you build your online profile and being aware that there is life beyond high school or college is vital to keep in mind. Your future matters as much as the next person’s and finding a job is an essential part of becoming an adult. You wouldn’t want to hire a person who posts intimate information about their sexual escapades or who posts photos of themselves drunk at parties every weekend on MySpace, now would you?

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