So, one of Techdirt's latest stories led me back to this article about the perils of putting too much personal info on line. Possibly even things like having the words "boredom" and "laziness" as part of a domain name you own, and then not updating the associated website for months on end, so people googling your name can wonder about your follow-through when it comes to keeping up with projects you start*.

Anyway, as a result I did a bit of googling of my own. It used to be that Google gave me far more prominence than one might expect, with buckets of references to python-list and python-dev posts. When I noticed those posts weren't on the first list of results anymore, and links for both the actor and the surfer were now included, I thought Google might have done something to give the non-mailing list results more importance, and give a result that better reflected mainstream celebrity.

A closer look though and I find that while the list of sites has changed, my original opinion still holds: even with a lot more mainstream media moving online, your Google footprint still says far more about your online presence than your fame (or lack thereof) in the offline world. And I still manage to find that fact both obvious and intriguing at the same time :)

*(FWIW, most of the stuff I write online is Python related, and ends up on the Python mailing lists rather than here)