TVTSOOBC, I argued at the time that Google bought the Usenet archive that it was a great idea: Google was so smart and so good-intentioned that they'd never fuck it up.
Oops.
I don't recall participating in any discussions about it but the DejaNews search was (IIRC) pretty flaky, and I think the future of the archive had been in question for a while until then, hadn't it? It was down, then up, archiving or not archiving for a while.
I recall being basically neutral about it. It didn't seem like it was particularly plausible that Google would screw it up -- how do you screw up an archive?
Like Josh, oops.
What happened, for those of us not on the up?
Related- the Tsarnaev trial (is it getting as much play around the rest of the country?) has a 101 question survey for potential jurors in the initial pool, which included- and answer truthfully on pain of perjury- #29:
"If you blog or post messages or opinions on websites, please describe the websites, the types of things you blog or post, and how often you do it."
I don't know if that's now a standard question for jury duty, I haven't been called in ~8 years, but shit I don't want to answer that. They did have the option of indicating you wanted an answer kept "private" but I doubt that means it will never become part of the public record.
I think I had a deja-news e-mail account. I lost my rocketmail named account, because I didn't check it enough. Much cooler name than yahoo.
(is it getting as much play around the rest of the country?)
I have managed to 100% avoid news of it. Mostly by only reading the weather, but anyhow.
I think I still have an aol account, all full of spam. For some reason my parents keep paying to keep our family account from 20 years ago.
"List the three search terms you use most often when surfing for porn:"
Just the other week, I was at my parents and I canceled their Earthlink account.
4: Google bought the archive from DejaNews and also managed to dig up a bunch of other archives, going back to almost the beginning of Usenet. For a while it was great; they had a very nice search interface and it would return useful results. Then Google decided to build out a mailing list product, and for some reason I will never understand merged it and the archive into Google Groups. Then Groups started getting ignored and the entire setup just decayed over time. You can still do searches (just yesterday I was digging through old Usenet postings of mine from 20 years ago) but the results are increasingly arbitrary and spotty.
I don't actually remember the period when the results weren't spotty and arbitrary.
I miss having my world.std.com email.
Good lord, my Usenet persona from 20 years ago can die in a fire.
Well, I was just able to find poems that I posted to rec.arts.poem in 1994! Surprised to find typos -- I guess I didn't know how to use cut and paste yet.
Oh hey look, 20 years ago I was arguing that it was basically unbelievable that an African-American woman would be elected President in my lifetime. Huh.
I didn't realize Google had fucked up the Usenet archive, though I do recall that I wasn't sanguine about their purchase of it at the time. And then Google Groups, well, nice try, guys, but what you think you want to do is not compatible with Usenet.
Remember how--or this is the impression I had, anyway--it was formerly considered just plainly obvious that one didn't use one's real name in online interactions? When did that change? September?
Good question. With the advent of Facebook? It's seemed a bit prissy to me to insist, as some do, that writing under a pseudonym is somehow cowardly, less than honorable.
I seem to recall that there were any number of kerfuffles on the Usenet groups I dipped into over sockpuppeting. The SF community had issues there. Somehow "use a single name, please, on pain of death" morphed into "use your real name".
Google doesn't seem to be good at doing things with smallish, defined collections that have their own internal structures and which require sustained attention. Good enough for many purposes is, well, good enough for many purposes, but if what Google is providing isn't good enough for your purpose, you should check your SOL account for updates on feature requests and improvement.
I totally used my real name on Usenet for a number of years beginning in 1994. A child of September, I suppose, or anyway the September after September (wasn't the tipping point canonically 1993?). A fair amount of stuff I wrote as a college student got archived on the web in one way or another.
Fortunately, my work now leads to fairly large quantities of scraped SEO content that incorporates my name, so now people have to go past the first few pages of Google results to find out what I was doing 20 years ago.
I'm still irked that searching my name doesn't get any results for me on the first page. It's improving as I'm on more articles, but I'm still behind a banker, a law professor, a chemist, and (this is the one that really burns) a philosophy postdoc.
I'm still the only me in the world according to google- how affirming. Number 3 if you just use my last name. What's weird is in images the first hit is me but then a whole array of pictures of people I've worked with or co-authored with.
You don't get any images of me. The closet you get is an image from a journal article on which I was coauthor. It's in some Slavic language Wikipedia page.
Looking at these images, I see one guy with my name is sporting about the events covered by showbiz.ie.
I've never done a Google image search of myself before. Interesting. Results: first two are me. Score! Other results include some ridiculously good-looking people with my last name, some normal humans with my last name, some of my geekier friends (because they're the ones who use Google Plus), and Billy fucking Ray's spawn.
I use Google images searches a lot for work. It works pretty well, except for when it doesn't .
24: If I change my name when I get married, it will be very common. Right now there's only the one person with my Hebrew English first name and my particular French last name.
It used to be the Google image results for my name was a picture of a naked dude with a very large penis. I was good with people thinking that was me.
5: That wasn't a question when I was on a jury here in January 2014, but that was a civil case.
My name combination is stupidly common. There are multiple people with my name in my field or in closely allied areas. I didn't find myself on image search at all, although I've been there in the past. Honestly, my own fault--if I put a little effort, I think I could have relatively high visibility on the internet. Whatever that's worth.
Googling "is [last name]" suggests "is [last name] a jewish name", which is odd as it's (I'm) very goyim.
The top three hits for my name are now me, which is strange as I haven't done anything to make it happen. The last time I checked, a couple of years ago (just before I started online dating, to see what potential suitors could find out about me once they knew my name), I was right down at the bottom of the first page, below a social worker with the same name who was clearly spending too much time on Pinterest.
Google Images confirms that I have an African-American name. Does that win me any anti-racist points?
Who knows what alternate-reality me would be like! Living in Brooklyn in 2005! Probably no doctorate! Lots of money!
I have a lot of clones, and I get a ton of accidental spam because I have my full name @ gmail. Last week, someone accidentally paypal'd me instead of someone else with my name (I hit refund and the guy thanked me for not keeping the money). In the past, I've been accidentally invited to fly out for onsite interviews at tech companies.
But, being the giant nerd that I am, a google search for my name returns a bunch of results pointing to me. The images are mostly other people, though.
I used to use my real name on Usenet (well the version without accent marks). Then later when I started a Livejournal it seemed the thing to do was use a handle. Facebook has my real name so my postings are pretty anodyne. For a long time old comments on Crooked Timber and Language Log were the first results for my name so I set up a LinkedIn account just to have that be the first result.
Looks like Tucker's brother is trying to make his way up the pageranks. I don't understand the part about how it's supposed to be an insult that she's never had a guy ejaculate on her face. She's not a real woman!
I used to use aliases everywhere out of a vague fear that I'd say something stupid and that it would be held against me forever.
At some point, I tried commenting under my real name in tech circles and it worked out well, so I quit using aliases for tech stuff and it seems to have helped my career, at least so far.
At least I don't have to wonder whether or not my comments would hurt my career.
I vaguely remember arguing with a homophobic New York City physician about National Association of Scholars stuff on some alt.somethingsomething.yaddayadda but I can't find my old tag anywhere. I did spend a lot of time on Plastic.com, though.
There's some sort of youth caseworker in County Kerry with my name, but the emails I get for her are sort of interesting and just general mailing lists, nothing breaking anyone's privacy. I know I should unsubscribe but I haven't.
I know I should unsubscribe but I haven't.
Mouseover.
Oh God, there was this period shortly after the DejaNews purchase when Google searches for my fairly distinct real name started turning up fanfic that I'd posted to Usenet in high school. Never in my life had I felt so ill used.
I've got a unique name, so the first page of google text search comes up all me. But the 11th image search result on my name is of Ted Cruz, who resembles me in neither name, image, nor political position.
Fortunately, I mostly lurked on Usenet like I mostly lurk on Unfogged.
I once started a moderated newsgroup in the soc hierarchy. It was excellent training in endless bureaucracy. The actual newsgroup was less interesting than the idea of the newsgroup, so I stopped reading it after a couple of weeks.
What's weird is in images the first hit is me but then a whole array of pictures of people I've worked with or co-authored with.
Scraped from LinkedIn pages, maybe?
My egogoogle results are for a baseball player, some dude who specializes in digital forensics (cool!) and a murderer. Oh, and an artist. I don't show up in the first few pages of results for either image or text search, which suits me fine.
Well, I was just able to find poems that I posted to rec.arts.poem in 1994!
heh. me too.
gack. i so do not want to read anything i wrote in 1994.
Nothing I wrote before 1999 is on the internet as far as I can see. I blame John Kasich, for actual reasons.
My name's quite common; in fact, the current top result is for a "Bass Master". It looks like he's got a TV show too, so I should be well safe.
Bass Master
I'm going to assume that's a rapper.
I'd never done the image search either. The first picture was of an array of cutlery, which was surprising. My surname is a noun, so there were a lot of them. None of me that I saw.