Re: Google & The FoRK Effect versus Gordon Mohr

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From: kragen@pobox.com
Date: Fri May 11 2001 - 23:48:47 PDT


"Gordon Mohr" <gojomo@usa.net> writes:
> This has an especially powerful effect, for good or for
> ill, if your personal name appears in a FoRK subject
> line -- and then generates followups with the same subject
> line. Some silly post from months ago, filled with
> randomized invective, might be how the world sees you,
> thanks to Google and the FoRK effect.
>
> Strangers might even come up to you in conferences,
> remarking that when they searched the web for info
> about you, they primarily found some lengthy complaint
> that was not immediately recognized as being frivolous.

It also means that you can get some arbitrary web page ranked fairly
highly on Google by linking to it in your .sig. If it's a page about
you, all the better.

When I applied for my top-secret clearance at my last job, I egosurfed
a bit to see what the DSS would find if they searched the Web to find
out about me. I was dismayed that one of the top few hits was a
message about how I was ashamed to be a citizen of a country with such
silly encryption laws.

They never asked me about it, though; it seemed that they were pretty
non-Web-savvy.


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