The Vanity Google.

I confess to having committed this most heinous of cybercrimes. Repeatedly. I've typed my own name into the Google search engine and closely examined the results.

In defence of this seemingly vain practice I offer this agrument: I am a public personality. Of course, I'm certainly no major celebrity. Heck, I'm not even a minor, B-list Canadian celebrity. However, I am a professional visual artist who actively exhibits throughout Canada & the U.S. and about whom articles are written -- often without my knowledge. Hence, I make use of the "vanity Google" to uncover these hidden treasures that refer to myself and/or my art.

Here's an interesting factoid I recently unearthed:

"Probably everyone who ever used a search engine at once entered his own name. "Vanity Google", as US people call it. There's practically always some information. If you play in a chess club, you'll find tournament result lists. There's photos of class reunions, quoted University papers, and archived commentary from newsgroup discussions. Exactly where your own name turns up is out of your control."-- Ansbert Kneip, Die Google-Jagd auf Libby Hoeler (Spiegel Online), May 12 2003"

The vanity Google has excavated newsgroup postings I had written over ten years ago. I've discovered online versions of newspaper reviews of art exhibitions I held over six years ago. Never would I have guessed that these writings would live on in apparent perpetuity in the transient world of cyberspace.

The moral of the story: be careful what you write, 'cause that shit will stick.