Internet footprints

I don’t think I know anyone who hasn’t done a vanity search at least once in his or her lifetime. A vanity search, for those who are wondering, is when you look yourself up via any search engine, usually Google, and sift through what it coughs up.

When there’s nothing else interesting online—say, Facebook’s pretty dead for the moment, or there’s nothing new on Multiply, or you can only find one inane video after another on YouTube—googling yourself can make for a very interesting alternative.

I have to admit I do this from time to time. I’m not as far gone as to write my own Wikipedia entry on myself, at least not yet, so what I dig up is mostly content I myself have put out to share in the World Wide Web: column pieces, blog entries, comments on other people’s sites, prayer requests from desperate times, and job ad postings for former employers. Occasionally, I still get links to news reports of an award I won ages ago. But that’s as exciting as it gets.

Of course, vanity searching can be twice as interesting if you maintain a blog account. This means you have a URL of your own, and you can look it up on Technorati.com and similar sites to check how popular your blog is. If you look up your URL, you can also find out who’s linking to your site, and since not everyone’s as anal as, say, you in asking for permission to link, you just might discover some little surprises. I’ve found my old blog, now deleted in a fit of temporary “tabula rasa” insanity, linked to some interesting ones, and I made a couple of online friends that way.

I have an anecdote about that old blog, which, if I remember correctly, I named “Measuring my life in coffee spoons,” after a line from one of my favorite poems. (Okay, cut me some slack—I was trying hard to get back to the literary life after three wonderful years as a marketing writer.) I maintained it around the same time I decided to pursue graduate studies at De La Salle University. As part of the application process, I had to interview one of the country’s top poets, who asked me one of the most nerve-wracking questions you can ask a newbie, borderline insecure writer: “What was the last book you read?”

I was frazzled (the last book I’d read was one of Paulo Coelho’s, and he’s not exactly well-received by literary circles), and the story of the rest of the interview found its way into my blog. Flash forward to a few terms later. At a workshop, I ended up sharing the same breakfast table with the same poet, and she proceeded to tell us about her own vanity search trips. “I found a blog entry,” she said, “that one of the DLSU students wrote about her graduate school interview.” Then, she went on to describe my blog. After she recounted my blog entry in its entirety, I had to fess up that it was mine. Thank God I didn’t write anything I would have regretted writing!

It was that experience that taught me to be careful what I put out in cyberspace because one day, digital data could come back and bite you in the ass. These days, whenever I write an entry, I always ask myself if I would mind if my boss or a potential employer finds my blog.

All these have been in my mind lately because of two reasons: first, I’ve been spending way too much time online; second, I’m one of those people who visit the blog of Australian blogger Brian Gorrell, who writes about some people in Philippine “high society,” to put it mildly. His blog uses the name of the person he’s fighting against, and in one of his recent entries, he dares this person to “Google your name.” I did (the fellow’s name, not mine), and all I can say is that even after the dust has settled, he’ll have a lot of cleaning up to do, with the way everything has spread virally. An indication of how big this has become: some of the blog’s more fervent regulars have made YouTube videos on the scandal.

Online Identity Management—look it up in Wikipedia—is getting to be the rage these days, with search engines starting to become almost as good as personal references. A slew of experts are now telling everyone to manage their own personal brand online. I’m still not sure what to make of it exactly—and I still won’t write my own Wikipedia entry—but it really has me thinking seriously about managing my online presence. I guess that means no Filipina-dating-whatever.com accounts for me. At least not under my proper name. ;-)

And what does your Internet footprint say about you?