The Life and Times of the Watters Family

Google Stalking Myself

I recently received an e-mail from a friend with whom I hadn’t spoken in a few months. In his message, he mentioned that he’d done a quick check on Google to see if I’d been up to anything lately (”Google Stalking” anyone…). Anyway, he noticed this article in a local newspaper for which I was interviewed, which served as a launching point for a long overdue conversation (I think I’m still waiting to here back from him…). This prompted me to do a similar search on myself. Historically, I’ve periodically searched my own name on Google just to see what it says, but I hadn’t done so for quite a while.

This time, I was a little surprised by what I found:

First, A little more background. Back on July 18th, Dave Winer announced that the RSS 2.0 Spec had been transferred to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and that an advisory board made up of Dave, Brent Simmons, & Jon Udell had been formed. In the months prior to this, the ATOM Project had been gaining momentum (at least in my opinion). I believed Dave’s move to be an empty repsonse to that with the possible goal of slowing the momentum of the ATOM Project as a potential competitor to the RSS format that he developed, so I, being the opinionated person that I am, decided to comment as such in the comment thread that had been set up. Let’s just say that I wasn’t very pleasant with my comments.

Here are all my comments (first to last):

first comment
second comment
third comment
fourth comment

In my first comment I described Brent Simmons and Jon Udell as Dave’s “patsies to serve as puppets so that the status quo can continue while operating under the auspices of independant governance”. It was wrong to paint them so negatively without knowing them personally. The invective (as pointed out to me in the thread) was wrong. I’m sorry. In subsequent comments, I accepted correction and then tried to make my point without being so insulting (it was a little long-winded, though).

This brings me to the crux of my point (which might not actually seem to be very insightful so some). When I made them, I never imagined that my comments would be promoted to the top of Google’s list of links for a search on my name. Now, when anyone searches for my name on Google, the #2 link in the list is me being an ass. Boy, that was stupid.

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