“Have you googled her yet?” “Willow…she’s 17!”

Slashdot just posted another story about how potential employers are googling applicants for jobs, and people need to be wary of what they post online, what it says about them, etc., etc. As if this were somehow new, exciting, strange, or not common knowledge. I know, I know, people post on MySpace and Facebook and wherever without thinking about the consequences, and to those people I say, *wake up and face reality*! I’ve certainly posted things on line, years ago, that I’m less proud of today, but in the year 2006, there’s no excuse for this sort of thing.

Anyway, the article made me decide to google myself, something I haven’t done in quite a while, and the results were pretty favorable.
# AgBlog. Welcome. Here you are.
# Amazon product page for _The Devil and Daniel Silverman_, a book that is not related to me in any way, but that I did buy at some point, although I haven’t read it.
# My Berkman profile page, slightly out of date right now.
# My Flickr photo stream
# My old Brandeis home page, which probably won’t be up for much longer, once Brandeis gets around to closing my account.
# My very few contributions to the OpenACS forum.

And only after *all of that* do we get chief medical officer Daniel Silverman of Princeton, Danny Silverman the actor, a Danny Silverman at UCSB, and then a few more scattered references to me.

What do you find out about me from googling me? That I have a blog, that I went to Brandeis, that I take pictures, that I like open source software, that I had a brief interest in the Rhythmbox music software a few years back, that I wrote a couple messages to a mailing list about wearable computers, that I work at Berkman, that I had a judiciary case in the Brandeis student government court about something having to do with free speech, and that I had a hand in something called Finnegan. None of this stuff bothers me, in fact I’ve written about all or almost all of it right here on this web site. I think my online profile is pretty much under control.

Surprisingly, there is no mention whatsoever to my exploits in high school nor my article on Salon.com. For shame, Google, for shame.

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