Looking yourself up on a search engine
Today I return to the notion of ego-surfing, but from a slightly different point of view. If I type my name into Google, the top ten results all relate to me. In fact, it took quite a while to find some references that weren't. Here (in search result #68) I win something (maybe a free holiday); and here (result #152) I am an Australian Rules football player.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly unique about my situation. Like many computer scientists I've been on the web for a long time because academic computer science departments were early adopters of the technology. But just imagine the poor soul whose name is Dennis Ritchie or Robin Milner. They indulge in a little bit of ego-surfing and any genuine references to them are swamped by the zillions of pages out there about computer scientists that they've never even heard of (in all likelihood). Sure, if your name is Bill Clinton, your situation is worse, but at least you know what to expect when you search for your name on the web.
Clearly we all need to adopt e-mail addresses as names in a desperate attempt to get unique identifiers, and, oh happy day, here's a story from the BBC about something almost as good.
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