The problem arises, however, when we’ve got more than one space online where we’re present. And that’s true for a huge, and rapidly-growing, percentage of people. How do we keep interested people, whether it’s one person or ten million, in the know about all the different places we’re active?

The best solution is also the most expensive and time-consuming: creating, maintaining, and updating a personal website.  There’s something to be said for that, but what about all the people without the money, time, or interest in creating a whole website?

If you’re in that realm, try Card.ly, a service that aggregates and shares your entire online presence. It’s a personal website for those who don’t want a personal website.

The first step is to sign up: You’ll choose a password, and an email address. At the same time, you’ll pick a username: this will be the name used to find your page at the url http://card.ly/yourusername. Choose carefully, because that name becomes your brand (using the same name as your Twitter or Facebook page is a good idea).

Once you’ve signed up, you begin by adding social network accounts to Card.ly. Currently, the site supports, among a huge number of others: Blogger, Delicious, Digg, Disqus, Facebook, Flickr, Friendfeed, Google, Last.fm, Linkedin, MySpace, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Vimeo, Wordpress and YouTube. And those are just the better-known ones – there are even more supported services.

To add a network, all you have to do is enter the username. There’s no need for passwords, so no security issues – since you can’t add information through Card.ly anyway, there’s no need for a password anyway.

Next, you’ll add some personal details about yourself – a bio of sorts. Add your name, birthday, gender, location, and pick an avatar (you can pick and choose among these – don’t share what you don’t want to). Add your IM accounts, RSS feeds, and whatever other information you want. Below it, there’s a space for a longer-form bio, as well as a space to put contact info – this is where to put an email, or a phone number you want people to be able to reach you at.

The design of the Card.ly site is your choice, too – well, out of 27 templates. They’re nice-looking, though, and most people should be able to find something useful from them. The design’s the last step, and then you’ve got a page that might look something like this:

Once you’ve got your Card.ly account set up how you want it, start sharing! Card.ly lets you send a message on Twitter about it, as well as tons of embed codes for various sites; or you can just share the URL of your profile anywhere on the Web.

If you want even more features (like registering your own domain, removing ads, or tracking all the statistics on your site) you’ll want to get a Premium account – either $2.99 a month or $24.99 a year. The free version, though, will be more than enough for most people.

If you’re looking to build a brand online, there’s no better way to do it than to have a personal website. If you don’t want to pour your time, money and energy into it, though, Card.ly makes simple work out of it.

How do you manage your presence online, especially across multiple places?

Photo: NathanaelB

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If you take a look at the categories you will notice several unusual ones, for instance Most Likely to Change the World or Most Likely to Get Users Sued. That’s the spirit, you will not find the usual boring categories in that list. Each of the twelve categories contains a list of Open-Source applications that can be voted for. Interested users can also skip the voting process and head right to the project’s website to download any interesting sounding application.

There are some “serious” categories as well, like Best Project for the Enterprise, Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins and Best Tool or Utility for Developers. I’m still a bit puzzled why Launchy made it into the category Most Likely To Get Users Sued.

You need an Open ID or a Sourceforge account to vote for the best software in each category. I for one will head straight to the download sites to download anything of interest from the list.

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It all starts with an upload obviously. Not your usual pick a song and hit a button type of upload though. You do pick a song but can add a wealth of information to the upload including an extensive description, genre, bpm, record label, catalogue number, release data, track number, keywords and even a buy this track link.

Artwork can be added as well and a decision has to be made if the song should be publicly or privately accessible. If the latter is chosen users can be picked from the list of followers and followed or by email. Emails will be send to users with a direct link to the song so that they can access it at the SoundCloud website. Those users have to chose a password for the first time and can use that password to access that song and any other that they are invited to.

Users with access rights can leave comments that are attached to a specific time of the song which is another interesting feature.

Public Songs can be embedded in websites like the example above. The color of the player can be selected freely. Users can jump to any position of the song. I’m a bit surprised though about the lack of player controls. There is only play and stop. Downloads on the other hand are blazingly fast.

SoundCloud offers some interesting unique features to its core audience. I have three invites up for grabs, if you want to give it a try leave a comment. I pick three random ones tomorrow.

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Each project consists of a name and a color. That’s the minimal constellation. Additional data like contact names and email addresses can be added and sub projects can be created. Each project and sub project is listed in the left column and can be accessed with a double-click to change data, add sub projects or write comments on previous time entries.

The time of a project will be tracked when the user drags the project into the Currently Working On area of the application or by clicking on the Work On button in the project’s detail view.

Instead of tracking the time in real time it is possible to drag projects into the weekly view and edit the time manually. A double-click leads to that option which also offers access to the comment function.

Automatic time tracking cannot get better than this. The application is very responsive and it is easy to create new projects or sub projects. Reports are saved in Excel format which is also excellent.

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