So as of 4pm Friday, Audrey Watters will officially be a free-agent, a word-slinger, a freelance writer for hire, and all that. Yay me. And yay for having http://audreywatters.com -- my own website -- where I can build brand Me. If you Google me, you find me here.

I've registered the domain, I have a host for this site, I've installed Wordpress, and I've added Google Apps... OK, ok, I lie. My boyfriend -- the IT department of brand Audrey -- did all that. I watched. I TOTALLY paid attention. Does that count?

But seriously, I recommend to everyone: register your name as a domain. Build you, your presence, your brand online.

Michael Arrington wrote a post last weekend titled "Reputation is Dead," contending that "Trying to control, or even manage, your online reputation is becoming increasingly difficult." And as I struggle to help Isaiah shape his digital footprint and as I struggle to craft mine, I agree -- it's tough. But certainly one of the best ways to at least have a small say in crafting that reputation is to own you-as-URL.

If you aren't quite ready to host your own site (if you don't have a pocket IT guru like I do), then you'll find that most blogging services offer you the ability to register your own domain name for a price. The blogging site, Posterous, announced yesterday that they would make this service incredibly simple -- handling all the [A record blah blah blah blah blah Charlie Brown teacher voice talking through my boyfriend's instructions on how he set this up blah blah blah insert tech talk here blah blah blah] for you. For $25 a year (which is, I should note, more than what you'd pay if you registered the site yourself with, say, GoDaddy), you get your domain, your blog, and -- and this is the part I really love even more than the push-button-simplicity -- Google Apps setup for you. Google Apps provides you with email, calendar, docs, sites, and the whole Google Apps Marketplace. You get your own wiki, man! Your own goddamn wiki!! And, um, email. And stuff.

I'm already a fan of Posterous; I use the service to house my not-quite-ready-for-primetime-blog posts -- those ideas too long for twitter and too half-assed for this blog (because the ideas here are sooooo well developed, amirite?). There are other services that do the same thing (Tumblr, for instance) but I like the simplicity of just emailing my thoughts to my Posterous without having to think at all about look and layout.

If you haven't secured your neck of the interwebz yet because you're just not sure you're geeky enough to do it, Posterous has made it pretty simple to do so.

And despite all the recent sturm und drang about the end to our control over our online reputations, if you want to fight for a modicum of control, then you really should grab your domain -- whether you do it via Posterous or not.