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Thursday, 20 May 2004 |
The other day at work the topic of "Googling yourself" came up. This is, of course, the vain practice of typing your name into Google to see what comes up. This topic came up because my wife called to tell me I am "famous". Her definition of fame came from the fact that Googling me turns up about 250 hits while she registers only 4.
A few co-workers were in my office so I decided to Google them too. It seems I'm still the most famous of the group (at least by the nerd standard of google hits); they managed about 50 hits each. In the process I discovered how much by boss paid for his house and that my coworker had the email address "
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" when he was 13 years old.
Because Google is so good at digging up the dirt, you can't rely on obscurity to bury things you would prefer others didn't find. This increases the power of online publishing, making it a societal form of the eBay reputation system. Many massively multiplayer online games rely on a reputation system (Ultima Onlie was the first) to help players figure out who's naughty or nice.
Could Google be evolving into a real world reputation score? Google uses the way pages link to each other to determine relevance and importance, but in so doing they also make an implicit judgement on the relevance and importance of the people who created and are mentioned in those pages. What Google doesn't do is make value judgements about content, so it's all there - good and bad. This gives both you and other people a very powerful way to diseminate information about who you are and what you've done. As I write this I'm architecting what you see about me when you Google me. Alternatively, you could buy jasonisanerd.com and start detailing everything that's wrong with me and that too would become part of my Google legacy.
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