Once upon a time, a resume was a piece of paper, a single sheet that listed the applicant's qualifications, contact information, and references. It was short, it was controllable, and it was discreet.

Nowadays, however, the resume is only the beginning: Any employer worth his salt will conduct an extensive search of the online profile of every job applicant. Unless the applicant is careful, those pictures from Spring Break will inevitably surface, leading the prospective employer to ask whether he or she really wants to hire Cancun's Beer Bong Champion of 2007.

Of course, it's not all that hard to clear up most of your online profile. You start by simply pulling out all of the fun and incriminating pictures, movies, and testimonials from your Facebook and MySpace pages. Once you're done with that, go to all of your non-anonymous web pages and take down anything that would make your mother cringe. Finally, Google your name and make sure there's nothing else out there that you need to worry about. Clear out all the sites that you can access and see what you can do about the others.

Suppose you don't have a web site or a blog, yet you felt compelled to warn the world about what a pile of crap Speed Racer was. Or you need someone to clean out the overgrown bushes in your back yard, or want to call attention to the YouTube video of your son catching his first pass, or sell bag full of dirty paint brushes? You could bounce around to Craigslist, bulletin boards, etc. Or you could do it all via Google Base.

Google Base, a service in beta-test status, is a simple solution for a wide variety of needs. In a nutshell, in Base you can provide searchable tags for content you already have online, to elevate the likelihood it will appear in response to a Google search. For example, by adding the tags "worst movie ever", "terrible movie", "waste of film", and "I'd rather gouge out my eyes with a melon baller than sit through this film a second time," to a link to your blog rant , that rant could receive more attention.

Suppose you don't have a blog? Base allows you to create your post within one of its forms, and then creates and stores a web page with that content for you, providing a URL you can distribute. I created a book review as an example.

Over half a billion items are for sale on Base, and job listings, vacation property rentals, and the like are also numerous. The free-form design is slightly off-putting for someone like me, used to narrowly-defined Internet services, but could be a great option for you any time you want to throw something onto the Internet without going to the trouble of setting up your own site.

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