XML News from Saturday, November 29, 2003

My Google number is 51,900. Pretty good. I'm running ahead of Grady Booch, Bertrand Meyer, and Jerry Pournelle but behind Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee, Jesus Christ, and the Beatles.

I'm pretty sure Booch, Meyer, and Pournelle are all more famous than me and deservedly so. I suspect this has a lot to do with how much of your fame comes from the Web, and how much you self-post. I personally generate thousands of pages a year with my name on them between this site, seminar notes, archived mailing list postings, and other similar content. Plus, I suspect Google counts the pages on different URLs for my sites (e.g. http://www.cafeconleche.org/ and http://www.ibiblio.org/xml) as separate pages, so my number needs to be at least divided by two. I can't let my head get too big.

One advantage to such huge amounts of self-generated content is that what you're likely to find out about me on the web is pretty much what I want you to know about me. I control my own image. I was curious to see how much information I don't want random surfers to know popped up on the Web, so I did some searches for my name in conjunction with my home address, social security number, phone number, and so forth. I am pleased to report that I don't think you can find any of that without paying for it or asking me. In the past some of this data popped up in the domain name registration records and Alexa, but I think I've managed to scrub all that. There is still one way to find my address and home phone number on the Web, but you've got to think about it. You can't just google me. And now that I've noticed it, I'm going to see what I can do about scrubbing it too.