I have several blogs and contribute to a few others. When I log into my blogs, stats pop up and I’m always curious to see how people find my blog amongst the abyss of blogs. The stats list search terms that have been used. What caught my attention with this was finding that my name was in the search terms. Honestly, I’m not that interesting but this left me wondering why would anyone bother and what is out in cyberspace about the infamous me?
So I hit one of my favorite places online…Google! It’s very easy to google your name just make sure that you put your name in the search like this, “Your Name”. Amazing the amount of information that you will find. Every tweet, petition, online associations, almost everything that you have done online is there. You can research even further. Go to Pipl and the information that you’ll find there is just plain creepy. I found a list of items that I had purchased on Amazon.com., an old Ebay account and even a website that I’d built 9 years ago.
Cyberspace is continuous as are your activities and most people don’t have the time to continuously search themselves. Google offers a free service called Google Alerts. It’s very easy to set up, you can choose the terms to search for and the amount of times you want to have alerts emailed to you.
What can you do if you find something online about yourself that is erroneous or more then you’d like the world to read? You can write to the source, request that the information be removed and hope for the best. If you are really done with the cyber world and wish to make an exit, there is a service called Wed 2.0 Suicide Machine that eradicates your online existence.
Ultimately its probably best to just monitor yourself by using commonsense online.
©2010 YP Mazzulo
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