When you spend a bit of time on the internet, you end up with memberships and profiles all over the place. Sites that look promising but aren’t (and some sites you have to join to even try) litter cyberspace with evidence of your name, age and interests. Those bits of cyberlitter can be useful – but they’re hell to manage.

I have profiles and memberships on dozens of sites and online services. I am a member of Blogger (obviously), MySpace, Tagworld, 43Things, Flickr, Last.FM, del.icio.us, Bloglines, YouTube,and many, many more.

For those of us keen to connect with a wider audience for our blogs, or for business networking, personal profile or whatever, this is probably a good thing. Anything that points to your website stacks the Google page rankings in your favour. For others, it’s no big deal. It’s just cyber-debris you’ve left scattered in your path across the internet.

It gets to the point sometimes where you sign up for something, have a look at it, and then never go back again. It was like that for me with Ziki.com.

Essentially, Ziki is an RSS aggregation platform. One of the newer generation Web2.0 sites that entirely consist of user-generated content. They let you build a profile, then compile the RSS feeds you give it to display as ‘your content’. It’s kind of a cheat’s way to drive traffic to build Google AdSense revenue. But hey – somebody’s got to be finding it useful.

Anyway, I received an email from them today. They’ve bought ‘Andrew Dubber’ as a Google AdWord, so whenever anybody Googles me (so – er – that would be me then), my Ziki page shows up in the sponsored sites column – like this.

Not sure what I think about this. Though I do like the idea that it costs them a little bit of money each time somebody clicks on it. Shame it goes to the Google people.

It got me thinking though: an active internet participation requires a kind of distributed identity.

The best way to manage that identity – particularly if you have cause to promote yourself or what you do (say… if you’re a professional musician) is to have a ‘centralised’ website with your own domain, and manage it so that each of your sites point back to that website – and all have some sort of regular activity on them.

I’m a big believer in regularly updated content. It’s the only way to create and maintain traffic online. MySpace, Tagworld, Mog, Last.FM – anywhere you can. I may not be as active in following that up as I would like to be, but then I’m not trying to sell records here.

It’s a daunting prospect. Time consuming, to say the least. And where the hell is all that time spent posting new material to all those websites coming from?

It’s a matter of workflow. And with that in mind, may I introduce you to the single most helpful website I’ve found since del.icio.us: Zenlist will change your life.

Zenlist is based on the Getting Things Done book that has been raved about here and all over the internet. Until now, I’ve been using Gmail as a GTD system. No more. Zenlist wins.

Set up a few ‘contexts’ (places where you do stuff). I picked ‘At the computer’, ‘At work’, ‘At home’, ‘Out and about’, as well as ‘Email’ and ‘Phone’ as contexts in which I work.

Then name some projects. A project is anything that’ll take more than one step to complete.

Finally, add some ‘next actions’. What is it you have to do? What project is that attached to? In what context will you do that thing? When does it have to be done by?

Zenlist provides a very quick and intuitive way of managing that information – and reminding you at the right times to the right things. I’m going to make a phone call now – and I see from my list that there are three other phone calls I was going to make by Tuesday next week. Since I’m in ‘phone mode’ now – might as well do them all and tick them off.

From a workflow perspective – and this is something that I get asked about frequently when it comes to managing online music activity – this will save your life.

And it’ll clear up a bit of space for you so you can spend a little bit of time each day managing your distributed profile.