Big Brother

I had been treating this blog as if it were mostly between friends -- I've only posted the link on my Google talk away message and only people whom I email personally can see that. But, I've always tried to write knowing that anyone could read it. It is public, and at the very least there's a "Next Blog" option at the top that takes you to a random blog. They're usually in another language, but I'm sure people have gotten taken to mine. So I thought it was close friends and random strangers, two parties you can say mostly anything in front of. Or even be completely boring in front of.

However, this week I discovered that if you google my name, my blog is the top hit. This is a new thing. It really bugs me out. We had a discussion at our staff retreat in September about how googling is now the most common way to find out about another person even in the business world... and we talked about how you should be aware of what comes up when someone googles you and how you can attempt to manage and manipulate what Google will rank highest.

I google my friends, family, coworkers all the time just out of curiosity. I figure their achievements are most likely to be posted on the web and I want to see what they're famous for, what got them published per se. But now, it's not that I was a National Merit Scholarship Finalist in 2001 when I graduated from high school that's the top hit anymore, it's this blog... my boring ramblings to my closest friends when I don't have time to contact them directly, or when I need to get something annoying out of my system or share an interesting or outrageous article. That is what is getting presented to all the world as the best match for me. Haha, kind of deep I guess.

(I'm actually not even sure how this is matched to my name because I don't have my last name in my profile and I try to hardly ever use my last name in my writing. I guess because Blogger is a Google feature and this account is registered under my gmail which is registered under my name. Google is scary. I wonder if I used a different blogging service if it would still come up...)

So now I have to go back and reconsider whether I've really been writing as if anyone might read it. Would I want one of my bosses reading this? I wrote a little bit about stuff at work and although I didn't use any names, if you worked in our office you would obviously know who I was referring to. I might take down the picture of myself in a bathing suit from my vacation to Florida in June. I feel embarrassed about all the whiny stuff I've written -- I don't think a potential employer would hire me based on these ramblings. This blog could be a professional liability.

We might be going offline for a while. I'll keep you posted. Probably not here.