A confession

My name is Mike and I Google myself. There, I said it, I feel better already, like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. The last social taboo has been broken and I'm proud to be the first.

We all do it of course, its the web 2.0, Wikipedia equivalent of an entry in whose who? But nobody admits to it. Well actually I have a friend that delights in telling me that she occupies the top 3 spots when you Google her name but she's a strange girl.

I've never really cultivated much of an external profile as I'm in the engine room most of the time, shovelling coal into the boilers. I speak on the occasional panel, get quoted on silicon.com and here on ZDNet every now and again and I'm sure my bio is on the corporate web site somewhere...

So I thought I'd do a little experiment to see if my blogging here would have any impact on my anonymity. Last week I spent a very unhappy hour typing my name into Google and looking for any references to this particular Mike Barrett. Firstly I have to point out that I'm up against it here. There's a congressional candidate, an NBA basketball player and closer to home, that nice doctor on casualty (wrong spelling though). If you add to that the fact that I recently got invited to join the "Michael Barrett is Awesome" group on Facebook (current membership = 46) then you can see there is some serious competition.

After an hour, and limiting the search to the UK results, I finally located an entry about me appearing on a panel discussion (in 2005) on page 12. My friend would be laughing her pop socks off!

Then early this morning, I got a Google email alert (which is a sub taboo thing to do) which I set up for “Mike Barrett” and lo and behold it was about me! Excitedly I logged on and clicked through to…

My blog posts in ZDNet! Not completely convinced this was some kind of fluke I Googled myself, and after looking through the fifth page, I started to get despondent. Then I selected the “Pages from the UK” option and tried again and…

Excitement is not an adequate description! There I am on the first page! Not just once but three times! I almost call my friend before realising its 5.30 am and she'll just swear at me.

The point of all this rambling? Blogging on ZDNet increases your social standing and boosts your ego. I've gone from being a nobody to a minor somebody in less than two days.

Now I may never be a presidential candidate or play in the NBA, or even rival my friends ranking. But, when those other 46 Mike Barretts on Facebook Google themselves, I'll be up there in third place. Maybe they will elect me king....