The one thing I ever managed to get published by McSweeney’s, sombody reprinted on his blog for the sole reason of saying I was a loser for writing it. Yeah, thanks asshole. Where’s my royalty check?
–Cliffy
P.S. Mine’s the second one down.
There are a lot of people who share my name. If they or their friends ever Google their names … well, some of my stuff might well be quite an embarrassment to them. Gives me a warm feeling.
You appear to have majored in some type of engineering, and a cursory Googling of you now seems to indicate you’ve moved to Classics. That’s an interesting career path, if I may say so.
I’m a physicist, but with an engineering degree, too. Classics are a hobby. I also edit (and frequently write) The Light Touch in Optics and Photonics News, among other things. I get paid to do optics and laser stuff.
I googled myself once. Nuthin’! A very common difference in the spelling of my first name lists the author of a book on maintaining gay relationships.
Sometimes I imagine any one of several ex-girlfriends finding that and shouting: "Ah-HA! The problem wasn’t me after all. See, he didn’t really like girls.
Whatever makes ya’ feel good, babe.
Shirley Ujest: I’ve never heard of getting copyright protection that way. I suppose the date on the envelope proves when you authored a certain work? Would this hold up if it came into contention?
Just because you aren’t paranoid does not mean they aren’t out to get you.
Keep that in mind.
Just what do you mean by that, huh? HUH?? :dubious:
“asuume” in the middle of page 7: geez, you didn’t use Spell-Check? 
Hate to be the one to break it to you, John Carter, but some dude named Burroughs has been using your name like a mule.
At one point in time, if you googled “Pete Puma” my rant about him was in the top five returned hits. Even though we had an engraved Pete Puma on a fixture at work, I think Pete’s too stupid to figure out how to use Google, muchless grasp that I was talking about him. 
As for someone “important” seeing anything I write about them, I’m not really worried, because if I post something nasty about them, I’m not really concerned about them seeing it, seeing as how I’ve already got a low opinion of them, why should I care what they think?
Darn it CalMeacham, now I have to read your thesis. As if I had the time. That is one interesting, dare I say it, facinating, idea.
All my vanity googling ever turned up was a San Francisco opera singer who has my name, right down to the French spelling variation, and a young software entrepreneur in Montreal who got lots of press coverage during the tech boom because he was CEO of his own startup at 20, and he was French Canadian. French Canadians still have a bit of an inferiority complex, and delight in reading stories that one of their own can be “as good / successful” as other Canadians or Americans.
Yeah, here’s how that happened: Burroughs came by one day when I was away performing Great Deeds. Dejah Thoris was in one of those moods, ya’ know? So she tells him “Yeah, Ok, whatever” and signs some kind of release and there ya’ go. Privacy shot all to hell for the past 100 years, or thereabouts.
Sadly, sometimes stuff you DIDN’T write ends up with your name on it.
A guy in my college in 1994 got bored and hacked a bunch of campus accounts and posted really racist jokes all over USENET with them. If one digs hard enough with the correct ancient email address of mine and they will find them. 
I’m still embarassed by them (they are that bad), and I didn’t put them up in the first place!
I found something on the internet that I wrote in college that was published in the college magazine. I didn’t even know it was out there, and I can’t find it now, but it’s probably still floating around on the internet somewhere.
I googled myself one time, and I found out I’m a stripper. Or a real estate agent. But whatever I am, I’m not myself, because my web site doesn’t come up when I google myself. So maybe I don’t really exist.
I’ve credited Rez’s “Maybe I just shouldn’t try to remove my own hair…” about her adventures in self-waxing on a message board and an unrelated email group.
On the plus side, when I googled myself (sounds dirty, doesn’t it), I found a lot of things I had written when I had more time (about knitting), and I was mildly impressed with my former self.
May I just say how much I love that my name is about as common as John Smith? I’ve tried every combination of my name that I can think of and I still can’t google myself!
Making research public is an essential element of academia. Sure, it’s slightly easier to cut & paste than to plagiarise from hard copies, but it’s no earth-shaking change.
No idea about typical procedures, but my the copyright to my Master’s thesis is owned by the university - we were obliged to sign over the rights when submitting, and to have the relevant copyright statement in the preface (something that’s obviously more important in, say, medical research, but if anybody finds a way to make big money from medieval mass music, they’re welcome to it )
This inspired me to Google my name for the first time in forever. Some columns I wrote for an office newsletter came up first, plus, a couple pages over, a poem I wrote for one of my university’s literary magazines. Nothing too bad.
I have a totally unique name (my last name is hyphenated). I just googled myself and I have ONE hit, from a website I helped develop as part of my work study back in college. It probably hasn’t been updated since I graduated, so until I become rich and famous and everyone finally learns how to spell and pronounce my name, it’ll stay up there forever, my one Google hit.