A very useful service, KnowEm, is designed to empower you to proactively identify over 300 online services where either your brand is being used or not. If it is being used, you can quickly identify if you’re in control of it or not and if it isn’t being used, you can quickly establish an account thus preventing future confusion or hijacking of your brand.

We recommend KnowEm to protect your brand. Check them out today. They’re good people.

More information can be found on this press release.

No longer are you stuck with a bunch of different badges from a variety of services in a variety of colors and sizes into your sidebar. Instead you get a professionally designed badge that includes:

• Your name and title just as you have it on your PeoplePond profile
• Your photo from your profile
• Your Identity Verification status
• Chicklets (little icons) linking to your presence at all the services where your blog visitors can connect with and discover more about you.

Some of you will notice this badge follows the same great look used in the PeoplePond Facebook profile badge.

Both the ADAM API implementation and the WordPress widget provide complete SEO benefits by providing clean links from the badge back to your profile and also from the chicklets, helping boost your online personal brand’s SEO and visibility up even more.

To install the WordPress PeoplePond Online Identity Widget, simply search for the “PeoplePond Online Identity Widget” from the Plugins – Add New page and click Install when the plugin has been located.

To install the ADAM API badge on a non-wordpress site, you can call the API directly in one of two ways:

http://adam.peoplepond.com/peeps.php?displayName=XXXXXX&widget=yes

http://adam.peoplepond.com/peeps.php?displayName=XXXXXX&mini=yes

And of course, if you still haven’t created your PeoplePond and CompanyPond profiles, what’s stopping you? Get started now. 

You can now protect yourself from identity hijacking and provide your followers with the confidence that you are who you say you are. PeoplePond has introduced the first opportunity to verify your complete online identity. There have been other solutions offered up in the past but they’ve always been lacking the most crucial element, verification of you.

Just because there’s an online profile, social media account or blog and with a person’s name on it doesn’t mean that’s really the person in control of the account. For people looking for advice online or employers and trade partners looking to learn more about a potential employee or vendor, not knowing exactly who is represented where has been a serious concern.

The new PeoplePond service enables you to prove who you are and then display confirmation of your personal identity verification right on your PeoplePond profile alongside your online identity (the places online where you publish).

You can refer your followers to your PeoplePond profile for proof of your identity. As part of this identity verification service, you can also authenticate ownership over the online locations where you publish (social media sites, blogs, social networking sites, etc.).

Stay tuned for more announcements about additional tools, plugins and widgets for promoting your verified identity in the near future.

The ability to assert ownership over social media accounts and other sites has been recently launched on PeoplePond. And now that reach extends to blog sites. Making use of OpenID and OAuth support in the major blogging platforms, PeoplePond enables users to authenticate their ownership of their online content at these sites. Once a blog has been verified, followers will not have to worry about the authenticity of what they are reading.

There’s more coming so stay tuned. In the mean time, you can read more about this in the press release.

As noted in an earlier post, PeoplePond is enabling you to not only prove to your followers that you have proven your personal identity but also you have proven ownership of the accounts listed in the online identity section of your profile. Introduce OpenID into this equation and suddenly there are hundreds (if not thousands?) of services for which you can quickly prove ownership of to your followers.

More details are in the press release.

This is all about trust. Projecting your personal brand and entire online identity from a trusted platform that eliminates any concerns about identity spoofing will give you an added advantage with your followers.

So for those of you keeping count, a PeoplePond profile provides:

• Increased exposure for your entire online identity using a fundemental search engine optimization strategy.
• Advanced personal identity verification (you are who you say you are)
• Far-reaching online identity verification (proving ownership of online assets)
• A trusted platform from which to project your personal brand. 

And there’s more coming.

It’s so easy for someone to put up accounts on social media sites, free blog publishing platforms, etc. and pretend to be you. If you have a personal brand that you’ve invested years to develop, such behavior should scare the living !@#$ out of you. It doesn’t take much to destroy even the strongest personal brand when followers don’t have an authenticated center point that is independently verifiable.

Now you can create that trusted center point to provide your followers with your PeoplePond profile. Our users who subscribe to PeoplePond’s Identity Verification Package will discover two very exciting features are now available:

1. Personal Identity Verification
While there are many services that will enable you to verify that you own a specific account in an online service, they fall short of identifying you. It doesn’t do me, your follower, any good to see that “you” own an account at a social media site when I’m not sure “you” is really you. You can now provide that assurance to your followers with PeoplePonds Indentity Verification service. Utilizing an independent third-party to perform an instant background search we are able to provide you a very detailed multiple choice list of questions to answer. You’ll see when you take this test that it can be hard for you to answer these questions about you, so you can imagine how impossible it would be for someone to try to get through it if they’re not you.

Once you’ve successfully proven your identity, the badge on your PeoplePond profile will reflect that. We’ll soon enable you to place this badge on your blog or other locations to provide the confidence your followers need wherever they find you.

2. Online Service Authentication
Now that you have proven your personal identity, there is real value in claiming ownership over your online identity. We begun enabling you to claim your accounts and demonstrate that on your PeoplePond profile. We’re just getting started but here are some services you can now verify your identity on:

• AIM/AOL
• Brightkite
• Cliqset
• Facebook
• Flickr
• FriendFeed
• Get Satisfaction
• MySpace
• Picasa
• TripIt
• TwitPic
• Twitter
• YouTube 

The process is simple. Log into your PeoplePond profile and click the “Verify Services” button. Then click the button for the service you want to verify your account with and confirm to that service that you want to provide PeoplePond access to confirm your account. And if you haven’t already added the service to your profile, it will be done automatically for you.

We will be adding more and more services to this list very soon and ultimately you will be able to authenticate your identity for just about every place your online identity extends to.

This is all very exciting for us to provide to you. PeoplePond is the only service I’ve seen that combines these two verification services into a single platform, all while increasing the visibility and exposure for your brand in the most positive light.

Upgrade your profile with the Identity Verification Service today. You’ll also discover that you’ll get the all the benefits of the PeoplePond SEO package included as well. That’s a lot for less than $10 a month.

Read more about these new features of PeoplePond in the press release.