Sunday, August 9, 2009

Milestones, In Which I Stroke My Ego and Wonder What It All Means

Milestones are often a time of introspection. Why buck tradition? Of course, what constitutes a milestone is in the eye of the beholder. A rez-day? One's typist hitting a birthday divisible by ten? Every third arrest?

I noticed, thanks to the wonders of Blogger, that I had recently passed 500 posts. Coincidentally, I'm approaching 1000 tweets on that compendium of minutae, Twitter, and am almost at 400 posts on the Steamlander (nee Caledon Forums) site. Add to those numbers comments I've left elsewhere, and that's a great deal of talking, even if I don't always have something useful to say!

That induced me to check the Googles, and I found an interesting comparison: the search term "Rhianon Jameson" returns almost 10,000 hits, while a similar search for my typist's name yielded roughly 20,800. (Both numbers are substantially inflated by duplicate entries and all those extraneous hits at the end that have nothing to do with the desired search. It's the comparison I find interesting, not the raw numbers.) (I mean, really, I have a big ego, but it's not that big.) The latter figure reflects several people with the same name, including middle initial - while it's an uncommon combination of names, at least two others have a substantial Aetherwebs presence. (I'm still holding half of the top ten slots, though!) In contrast, thanks to someone who had snared "Rhiannon" ahead of me, "Rhianon Jameson" is more likely to be unique. In rough terms, that means Rhianon has about the same Aetherweb presence as her typist does after more than 15 years of professional toil.

What does that all mean? It seems to me that one can draw several conclusions:
1. I need to get out more. This can be rephrased as: you guys are my life.
2. I like to hear myself talk.
3. I like to argue with other people. (Couldn't we just say "hold spirited discussions"?)
4. I don't exercise a great deal of editorial restraint.
5. It's easier to have a Web presence now than it was 15 years ago.
6. I enjoy what I'm doing.

The list is not necessarily exhaustive, nor are the items mutually exclusive. As long as number six holds, however, I'll keep at it.

3 comments:

Mako Magellan said...

Miss Jameson,

This is an interesting subject. I did some comparative research on it.

"Mako Magellan" has 17,300 Google hits, and this is not enough at all. Not at all!

My real name has 137,000, and this is far too many. First, I have a common name, so the links generally send anyone looking for me on a wild goose chase. But more importantly, I want fewer references to me on the Internet these days, and have taken down several pages in pursuit of this goal. Why? I am not sure, but one reason I suspect underlies this is that I want people to form their ideas about me from me, not from representations thereof. Alternatively, I may just be mad. This is clearly a minority position :)

Regards,
alias Mako Magellan

Rhianon Jameson said...

One of the great things about SL - particularly Victorian SL - is that the names tend to be more, ah, singular than in RL. In addition to providing In Character amusement, it certainly makes easier sorting the wheat from the chaff on Google!

I won't opine on the madness, but I concur that yours is surely a minority position. Bring on the Google hits in both lives!

My typist has a friend whose goal is to break the top 2000 in downloads on the Social Science Research Network, and he's almost there...I won't claim any such firm goals, but neither do I scoff at those who regularly Google themselves. :)

Capt. Red Llewellyn said...

i think you are just splendid! and congratulations...on your milestones! thank you for following my blog and i really must find you on twitter if you're not already there! cheers dear!
~Capt. Red