Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Blog #4- Michael Warren

After Googling myself in a variety of different ways, I came away feeling like the results were pretty much what I expected. For a while now I’ve known of the (somewhat) up-and-coming musician named Michael Warren and I’ve also known of the producer/creator of Family Matters as well as the somewhat famed actor who most notably had a starring role on a television show entitled Hill Street Blues and was a member of the two-time NCAA basketball championship teams coached by the legendary John Wooden. As one might infer, my actual self is hidden pretty deep underneath a number of more reputable people by the same name. Warren, itself,is a very popular last name in America, and being that Michael has always been one of the most popular first names, it comes as no surprise to not be able to find myself at all. Even when I typed in my first name (including my middle name) I could not find myself, most likely because I rarely if ever enter my middle name on sites on the internet.

The only time I was actually able to find anything that had to do with myself was when I typed in my hometown next to my name. I was then taken to my own page on a site called peekyou.com that apparently identified myself under a list of alumnus from my high school. It correctly linked to my MySpace page where they were also able to list my usernames and interests. In fact, it was even able to correctly identify possible relatives of mine which is strange considering we haven’t denoted that on Facebook. That being said, it had my age wrong (it thought I was 25) and linked to other public records of different Michael Warrens other than myself.

Personally, I’m both happy and unhappy that I’m very hard to find through Google. On the one hand, I’m glad my personal information is not readily accessible and I have a relative aura of mystery/obscurity on the internet whereas many other people’s info is hung out on the clothes line for all to see. On the other hand, being that I’m trying to get into the entertainment industry where I want to get my name out to the masses, it’s very disheartening to learn that I most likely will have to change my name or use a different variation of my name if I ever wanted to be searchable to the public. It’s certainly an interesting topic, as everyone has Googled there name before and there have been a number of horror stories about people getting into lots of legal/professional trouble because of things found through Googling someone’s name, but for me it won’t have much use until I begin to walk the path of my career. By that time, the way Google shows links and their privacy policy might be completely different.

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