Daily News article
Reporter Piper Weiss - I love that name - penned an article in today’s New York Daily News titled What a tangled Web we weave: Being Googled can jeopardize your job search. I read the headline and thought that was a pretty obvious thing, but she raised a point I hadn’t thought of before.
Brief tangent - last year, some clown accused me of hacking into his computer after I posted information from a webserver log showing that he’d posted as two different people on a message board. If you know how server logs work, and he did not, you know that stuff like IP address, operating system and version, web browser and some other data are stored whenever you access a web site. I had access to the server log. The guy was pretending to be someone he wasn’t, and when I caught him at it he accused me, on a public message board, of committing a felony to get the data. Which I had not done. That’s defamation of character, which I could have sued him for. (But I didn’t.)
So one thing not mentioned in Weiss’ article is defamation of character, and how that could harm one’s ability to get a job. I think that’s a very real risk. The thing she mentioned that never occurred to me, though, is that a potential employer might mistake me for someone else with the same name. It turns out two other men named “Robert Sterling” have higher Google moxie than me. One of them is the famous actor, who according to IMDB is still alive. The other is a semi-famous leftist conspiracy theorist, which is amusing, but he is not me, either.
Filed under: Ejecta
Ok then, which Rob Sterling are you? Are you the Rob Sterling that roomed with me and Chris Newkirk in 1992 or that guy that promises bald people more hair (or is that Rod Sterling??) or someone totally different that has no clue what I am talking about.
Anyway, if I dont know you , I still enjoyed reading your blog.
I am neither of those people. See?
Hey Rob,
Found your comment while Googling the article you talked about - it sounds like you might be interested in the website we’re creating. ClaimID is a service that allows you to manage your identity on the web - basically letting people claim the stuff about them, explain the stuff that embarrasses them, and let people know who they aren’t. If you’re interested in checking the service out, you can drop me a line or request an invite. Be forewarned - the service is very simple, we’ve designed it to be easy to use by everyone (we tend to think there are lots of people out there unhappy with what Google says about them) so we’ve kept it minimal and focused. Either way - best of luck with your doppleganger!