1.3 Ego-Surfing and "Namerology"

/from our cyberlife dept./

Hearing about Numerology among the Chinese viz the Olympics got me to musing about "Namerology" as revealed by ourselves on the Internet.

In an era where it's so easy to go ego-surfing, it 's natural to start wondering if those who are "name twins" share anything more than the obvious correlates. This goes double if you think your own first and last is not entirely common.

My ego surfing has had a few surprising twists. First was the fact that my maiden-named self was much more common (and active online) than I would have guessed when I first looked in the 90s, and some of them were up to things (example below) that might make my mother blush. Then on the flip side in later life, I found that my later-named counterparts were also much more numerous than I would have guessedd, which I suppose I can count as a blessing for privacy.

Over the years, I adopted assorted handles and pen names for various aims, but now it's starting to seem like a good idea to add a twist to your sig if you want a high ratio of signal to noise around a specific identity. Unless you want the "real" you to live 10 pages deep in the list of Google hits, your primary name online needs to make a mark of some kind.

Surfing for Name Twins
I rarely Google myself. First, I'd have to use three or four variations to do a full check and who has the time; and second it could prove embarrassing when you have to stop and wonder who's reading it and thinking it might be the "you" you.

My most disconcerting example of same was finding out that one of my first/last name clones <maiden edition> was then a lady wrestler in Florida. That was a funny/ironic thing to see on the eve of a high school reunion (which is why I was ego surfing at all just then).

Please any lady wrestlers reading, don't take this as a slam. It's just hard to imagine any universe in which the me I know would be choosing that as a profession. But since it makes no sense to run around saying "not me!" to everyone who might see, I just tend to duck even looking.

But on the eve of getting my new set of blogs ready to roll, I decided to check again. I'd long known there were so many editions of Me/<Maiden>, here and abroad, that we should form a club and compare our life stories since that particular first-and-last is not so common. I still may do that sometime.

 

But what I hadn't checked more than a couple of times was Me /<TheEx>, even though that is, in fact, the combo by which I have been longest known.

This time the problem is the opposite; that particular combo is so common it spawns almost 10,000 entries, and there's clearly no way I will be clicking through dozens of Google pages trying to drill down to see which ones are from the me I know to be me. For those who know my real name today and try to find me quickly, all I can say for certain is that none of "me" is on the first page of Google hits.

I am not the state representative. I am not the software trainer. or the women's business forum leader in a major Eastern metro and I am not the Scientologist lady. Nor am I the one that Google suggests has a list of links at the Washington Post (but if you know my ex-hub's surname and Google it with my first name, you are free to imagine I might be). That last one sorta makes up for the lady wrestler thing.

 

So do you have any stories (funny, sad, flattering, disconcerting) from your own ego surfing?

Give me the gist in an email (to stories@  this domain), put "Surfing" in the header, and if we have space to work it in, you'll get a note back asking for details.

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Related story: Your Ego Just Took a Blow at Wired.com

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image credit: An illustration from page 30 of Mjallhvít (Snow White) in an 1852 icelandic translation of the Grimm-version fairytale. Put into the public domain by  Project Gutenberg, and archived at Wikimedia Commons.