Googling Myself

12 Mar

It’s not that I’m vain, or anything, but I do occasionally Google my name (okay, I am vain; but can you blame me with this hair?).  At least I don’t check to see if I’ve got a Wikipedia page – no, really, I don’t, honest…

I have to Goggle myself when I’m submitting poems, because so many editors exclude poems already published online, even if it was on my now defunct poetry blogs which can no longer be accessed.

I Gaggled four poems and my name this morning and I was disappointed to find one of them in the 2010 comments section of a poetry blog, which means I can’t use it.  

The Haggle brought up a pleasant surprise, however – which isn’t always a given when you Giggle yourself; all I’m going to say is tea bags/washing line/shame…. Fortunately, I’m such a prolific blogger that the embarrassing photo is hidden way down in my Boggle listing.  

I discovered that a poem published by English Pen last year in their Dictionary of Made-Up Words was featured on their website earlier this year, as part of an ongoing promotion of the book.  I didn’t know it was there.  I’m chuffed!

Even better – it was retweeted!  It’s nice to be twit.

You may say it was coincidence, but I think it’s strange that I didn’t come across this poem until I had my hair cut.  I’m like an anti-Samson: all of my power was consumed by my long hair; now it’s short, I’m discovering my work in the ether and being invited to take part in poetry events which may or may not come off so I can’t say anything at the moment…except that the invites were issued after the haircut…

So, do you Wriggle yourself?  Or are you afraid to discover dirty little secrets of yours hiding out there in the ether?  Are there photos of you drunk at a party? Taking an illicit beach day from work?  Wearing flares?

I’ll find out, you know, when I Ogle you.

About these ads

40 Responses to “Googling Myself”

  1. judyt54 March 12, 2014 at 13:58 #

    sometimes its not A Good Thing to Google oneself, in the same way reading a friend’s mail might tell you more than you ever wanted to know about how she really feels about you–or eavesdropping on a private family convo when your name comes and someone says, “shhhh I don’t think she’s asleep…”

    • The Laughing Housewife March 12, 2014 at 14:26 #

      I’d rather know all that stuff because I like to know where I stand. And I don’t hold grudges :) I get that I’m annoying :D

      • judyt54 March 12, 2014 at 17:04 #

        one thing i did try, rather than using my regular name (which is seems to belong to everyone from authors to strippers ), but just this ID. oh golly. im all over the place. Alll in one place. Both fascinating and disturbing at the same time. =)

  2. Ron. March 12, 2014 at 14:19 #

    By all means Google me. I was surprised (mostly pleasantly surprised) to find several pages of entries about me, me, ME! The other Ron Lavalette is a minister in your neck of the woods. Night and day.

  3. bevchen March 12, 2014 at 14:36 #

    I occasionally Google myself to make sure no information is on the Internet that I’d prefer not to be there.

    • The Laughing Housewife March 12, 2014 at 14:38 #

      Sensible. But can you remove it if necessary?

      • judyt54 March 12, 2014 at 21:32 #

        much of this stuff is archived, meaning you would have to find the site and track it down, possibly reregister; much of it is in the public domain meaning, no. But basically what I found, if you post online with an id, whatever is posted is out there under that id. which is a polite way of saying watch your mouth out there, you belong to the net.

        • The Laughing Housewife March 13, 2014 at 09:21 #

          It’s frightening, isn’t it?

          • judyt54 March 13, 2014 at 13:19 #

            I know you started this thread in fun, but you gave me (and the others here) something to think about.

            Having been online since 1996; I have left a trail of multiple IDs on at least a dozen message boards, poetry forums, countless commentaries on other sites, blogs, and help forums.

            Im going to spend some quality time today hunting down what just might be under my ids and how to possibly remove it. Or not. Like you, I tend to talk a lot (to the annoyance of a number of people over time) and sometimes the bear comes back to bite ya.

            Thank you.

  4. http://vivinfrance.wordpress.com March 12, 2014 at 14:47 #

    There is a fairly famous, much published author/artist called Vivienne Blake. It’s NOT ME! There’s also a Jamaican drug baron called Vivian Blake, also NOT ME, and an associate professor of something or other, also NOT ME

  5. Elaine - I used to be indecisive March 12, 2014 at 15:03 #

    Yes, I have Googled myself – nothing of any interest came up, apart from my blog and a load of other people with the same name, some of whom sound quite interesting. :)

  6. laurieanichols March 12, 2014 at 15:52 #

    I googled myself and aside from seeing a few other Laurie’s who are seriois professionals in academia, it had me on the twitter, my political blog and WordPress. Nothing scandulous, just little ole me. I think that your experience with the Google is much more exciting. :D

  7. Rorybore March 12, 2014 at 16:53 #

    I google myself — but since I use my alias on the Web most of the time…..no embarrassing photos will appear. Also, the web wasn’t so popular when I was in university…..so that’s a very good thing basically.

  8. slpmartin March 12, 2014 at 16:53 #

    Hmm…haven’t Googled myself…will have to give it a try. :-)

  9. benzeknees March 12, 2014 at 19:31 #

    I can honestly say I have never Googled myself! But now, you know I’m going to do it as soon as I finish writing this!

  10. benzeknees March 12, 2014 at 19:37 #

    OK, I have almost a full page devoted to my real name & multiple pages on my blog name! Who knew?

  11. Grannymar March 12, 2014 at 22:19 #

    Thank you. I just did a check under my own name and found a link to me with my phone numbers on it???? I have deleted them and other info I had not publicly shared. Grannymar I know about, but have you ever oogled images? worth a try.

  12. McGuffy Ann March 13, 2014 at 13:29 #

    Hmm…should I be worried? I don’t know. You are scaring me. ;)

  13. Three Well Beings March 13, 2014 at 16:23 #

    Anti-Samson! I like that. :-) I do google myself sometimes. I have a few academic reports and papers that have been published. I like to make sure they aren’t being plagiarized. Congratulations on your publishing accomplishments. You may very well have your own Wikipedia page some day!

  14. SchmidleysScribbling March 13, 2014 at 21:32 #

    When I retired, I stopped Googling myself. It is so tiring to be famous!

  15. Hattie March 14, 2014 at 22:04 #

    Every day I thank The Deity that the Internet did not exist when I was young.

    • judyt54 March 19, 2014 at 13:58 #

      Im wondering just how many of those social network kids are going to look back in 20 years from their new computer in their new office (the one with the really good views) and get curious about googling their former selves…

  16. kateshrewsday March 16, 2014 at 20:47 #

    If you Google odd stuff you often come across me :-D But the best way is to google Macaulay the Dog.

  17. bluebee March 19, 2014 at 08:26 #

    I’ve only done it once and didn’t find me, which is good :-) Although I did find a porn star with the same name ;-)

  18. Perfecting Motherhood March 31, 2014 at 19:10 #

    I think in this day and age it’s important to google yourself once in a while, to make sure there are no surprises out there. Some people mean well, and others don’t.

    By the way, it’s a bummer about your poem showing up in a blog comment. I wonder if you could ask the blog owner to take it down, so it gets its unpublished status again.

All comments are welcome, though compliments may result in you having your Malteser privileges revoked

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Guernsey Evacuees Oral History

An Overlooked British Evacuation

Janie's Place

Welcome to the Great White North....

Quickly in September

Her Bad Hare Days

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,110 other followers

%d bloggers like this:
http://thelaughinghousewife.wordpress.com/2014/03/12/googling-myself/
thelaughinghousewife.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-42
226088
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:QOAC572FGZ44CJFS74LMOPJ6ZTOHQZQJ
<urn:uuid:4ef805ab-95b0-41e4-903b-1ed1d4e8d555>
2014-11-01T06:29:16Z
192.0.78.13
sha1:OTR3ZDLQKSTNYECTERVICA7MEWT5YNXC
<urn:uuid:6fef457d-7ce9-4a0b-b1ac-3ccdfad652fc>
http://thelaughinghousewife.wordpress.com/2014/03/12/googling-myself/
length
response
<urn:uuid:1e88760d-2fc4-4f32-a535-6b6ae7a1f429>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-16-133-185.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-42
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for October 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf