Ego Surfing

I didn't know there was a term for it, but that's just me being naive. We're in the internet age. There's a term for everything, whether you need one or not. Just look at UrbanDictionary.com, you get everything from "pwn" to "leave-britney-alone." Which kinda already prove the point I'm gonna try to make in this post. You can find everything on the internet, E-VE-RY-thing.

Which brings me back to ego surfing or googling yourself. Anyone who's proficient enough to type a search query in any search engine has done this before. It's pretty fun to find out what people with your name are doing out there in the world. I share my name with doctors, a martial art master, CTOs, an actor, an artist, a professor, and the list goes on. I remember when I first googled myself, around 1999?, there was no more than a handful of Peter Chow's on the internet and maybe 10 pages of search result. 8 years later? Google throws me a hefty number of 2,280,000 search results and shows me that someone has registered both the domain name http://www.peterchow.com/ and http://www.peterchow.org/. That's a huge leap, that's mind-boggling expansion. That's the kind of growth in information we're facing today, where everything is becoming searchable. Our lives are now being digitally documented. Pictures, blogs, videos, and profiles.

During the NBA season I probably will never agree with him, but Mark Cuban makes an excellent observation that I found humorous. "By the time [my daughter] starts dating, I won't need to greet her dates at the door with a shotgun, I will have a digital history of the poor kid and know pretty much everything about him, before I meet him."

That's the truth. Anyone who's determining enough can find just about anything you or I have ever put on the internet. That includes anything ranging from what you bought last on eBay to a topographical rendering of your neighborhood made from the address you entered into one of those stupid "Get free Ipod" advertisement (I'm almost 100% sure 80-90% of internet user have done this once in their internet usage lifetime).

Which is why I don't agree with the article Seth Godin of Fast Company wrote about privacy. There's a reason for anonymity. I don't want everyone and their mama to look at anything of mine even if I can see who they were. That's like saying, sure anyone can look into my house because their credential is for all to see. Plus most of the argument he makes about auctions, newsgroup, email and information exchange can be said the same of their offline counterpart. All anyone need is a little common sense. Here's a little list to help people with a little less C.S. than some.

- Ignore morons who can't make good arguments, or make a counter argument so good that it leave them speechless. (If that doesn't work, go back to ignoring)
- Don't give out your internet address too freely to avoid spam (Seriously, you probably won't get that IPhone, so stop submitting those forms that want not only your email address but your home address)
- Make rational judgment before believing what you read on the internet.

As for privacy, just remember this one simple rule one of my classmate told me: "If you don't want your mama to see it, don't put it on the internet."