2012-366 Day 40 – Internet Presence

This post inspired because my name shows up in a blog much more popular than my own today! Less than two days until the softball tournament!

Have you ever Googled yourself? (Wow, I wish there was a better phrase for that.) Are you the first person that comes up under your name? What about your screen name? If you share your name with a celebrity or just have a common name you’ll have to do a bit of digging to find yourself. Since I have neither of those things, I come up pretty early in any Google search. How early? Well, let’s take a little trip. (Remember to log out of your Google account when searching – or better yet use incognito or InPrivate browsing sessions, otherwise Google’s accumulated information on you will skew the results.) All results as of 2/9/12.

Matthew Worland
Results: 1,440,000
Highest Rank: 1
Percent of top 5: 80%
My LinkedIn profile takes the top spot here, the second entry is for my office hours. Oddly enough, the third entry is for a Facebook page, but not mine (then again, I have my Facebook page somewhat locked down). My Twitter account comes in fourth, and the fifth is a White Pages search that lists four cities, three of which I’ve lived in, so I’m assuming there’s at least some reference to me there (not interested enough to go look).

Matt Worland
Results: 690,000
Highest Rank: 3
Percent of top 5: 40%
A CAD drafter who owns mattworland.com bumps me out of the top spot here, although the homepage of my site (mworland.com) comes in a respectable third. I’m listed under the fifth link, the collection of Matt Worland’s on LinkedIn. Amusingly, a link to my (severely out of date) ratemyprofessors page shows up on the first page here (these reviews are from back when I was a Graduate Assistant teaching lab classes in 2005).

disciplev1
Results: 3,300
Highest Rank: 1
Percent of top 5: 100%
It’s not particularly odd that I own this one, as it’s the screen name I use all over the internet. In fact, I came up with it in High School, so I have accounts that I forgot about when I scroll through these search results. I originally wanted disciple21, but that was taken at a lot of places. My first substitution was disciplet1, but, as some people pointed out, that looks like disciplette 1, which wasn’t really what I was going for. Since I was taking french at the time, and vingt-et-un is 21 in french, disciplev1 worked for me. I also liked the fact that if you took it as versioning, it could be interpreted as disciple version 1, which seemed appropriate given my computer background.

All in all, not bad, although probably a little easy as my name isn’t Thomas Hanks or William Smith.

Weight: 233.4 Max: 240 Min: 233.4 Body Fat %: 24.7
Yearly Mileage: 20.2 miles (+3.2 miles)
Current Belt: Purple – Next Belt: Orange – Next Test Date: 3/3/12
Fitocracy Level: 12 (15830 points, 1980/2750 to next level) – ID: disciplev1