Do A Search Of Your Name

Good advice, Stormie. I do this on a regular basis and it is a wise action.

Thanks for pointing it out to others who may not have ever thought about doing this.

Once a month? How about once a day?

I think I am totally addicted to google. I have found some strange stuff out there. The weirdest was a thesis that quoted a paper I wrote in University (I was cited in the footnotes). Only problem, the paper I wrote that she was citing? It was satirical. She unfortunately was quoting it as fact. Yes I think that was the weirdest thing I found.

I've seen threads before about online plagiarism, but it does bring up several points. Firstly, if your name is fairly common (mine seems to be), it's an arguably good idea to select an unusual pseudonym to make searching for "unauthorized" uses of your name and works eaiser.

So I just had to go Googling for "Ben Bradley" and the first reference to me is my Blogspot blog on the fourth page of results! That's also me a few more links down "Ben Bradley File Notes" where I did some audio processing that got put on a CD. What I found most amusing was this page:
http://benbradley.net/2007/07/03/other-people-named-ben-bradley/
Maybe when I get a novel published or do something else publicly noteworthy I'll ask him to to add me to that page.
ETA: I left a comment on that blog entry.

Also, it's advisable to search on the CONTENT of your work as well as your name. This finds instances of your work online where your name is, for some reason, not included, or even just misspelled. A search can easily be done with the first five to ten words of a sentence from your text included in quotes. And yes, you have to do this for every work you've done. Well, maybe not - I recall that you can set up Google to email you when it finds new matches to a search string you give, so you can set it up once and get notified of all new instances Google indexes.

I just checked my blog, it appears the last entry isn't yet indexed in Google, even though it's a few months old (even Google doesn't read my blog!). But I can Google this sentence fragment (including the quotes in the search string:
I've spent many years in online posting"
and come up with my first Blogspot entry, and fortunately, nothing else.

I'd suggest doing this for print-only publications as well. In the newsgroup rec.audio.pro there's a guy who wrote an article on microphone modifications to improve performance, and he was quite unhappy to find where someone else had put the whole article online (the text may have been scanned which makes it harder to find, but a search on the title is likely to find it). He was quite angry, but he did come to an agreement with the website owner to have only part of the article online, and a link to the publisher where one could order a reprint or the relevant back issue of the magazine.

I can't imagine anyone bothering to reprint anything of mine. If they do they'll be roundly flamed for posting crap and it will be removed all on its own.

I did a yahoo search, and found my website #4 - not too bad for a podunk little site!

I don't put whole works online, unless they're already published, or slated-to-be published poetry. To be honest, I don't think poetry is way up there with the list of stuff that people would want to plagairize--it just doesn't pay.

I think I will google a few of those now, though, just out of curiosity!

I can't be bothered. Uck.

I used to google all the time because, for some odd reason, the article I wrote for Dollar Stretcher a LONG time ago keeps popping up on other sites that don't pay writers for content. It's weird. And, ever since I started writing, four other Jennifer Hollowell's have popped up in the searches . . . a radio dj, a politician, a smoke shop owner and a real estate agent. I'm giving serious consideration to changing back to Jennifer Brennick, my maiden name.

For anyone sending out submissions and stuff I think it is really important to google your name. Because agents etc certainly do. You need to be aware what's out there about you. Me, it's all book stuff and some acting stuff. But even my friends who are in less public jobs are online, their picture from a work website, a paper they once wrote on micro biology.

My agent once googled someone who submitted something to her. She had asked for a full, and found the person had dissed her in his blog. That didn't sit to well with her.

Prospective employers google you, it's unfortunate, but true. So one should know what's out there.

Toothpaste said:

For anyone sending out submissions and stuff I think it is really important to google your name. Because agents etc certainly do. You need to be aware what's out there about you. Me, it's all book stuff and some acting stuff. But even my friends who are in less public jobs are online, their picture from a work website, a paper they once wrote on micro biology.

My agent once googled someone who submitted something to her. She had asked for a full, and found the person had dissed her in his blog. That didn't sit to well with her.

Prospective employers google you, it's unfortunate, but true. So one should know what's out there.

Click to expand...

Argh. Yikes. Well...I only have writing credits. I do remember a crazed extremist with my name though...from a google search I did about a year ago? I hope nobody confuses us.


ETA: You had me worried. A search produced quite a few hits...but there seems to be many people with my name.

My own hits were all writer related; WCDR announcements, my blog, magazine articles that have been posted online as well, poetry, etc. No agent bashing! My baby's in an agents hands right now too. pppppppphhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwww.

Oops. I googled my name and my blog came up and the very first example of it is my dissing of my son's teacher.

I hope she isn't googling me.

I make it a matter of my business-related jobs to google myself once a week. Ever since I found some of my psuedonym's novellas being sold on e-bay for a dollar and directly in competition with my publisher, I thought it a good business practice.

It's also interesting to see how your pages change. For example, yesterday when I started googling, my books Fictionwise page came up number one. Now it's my book trailer. It lets me know what's working and what people are looking at.

oh and for the record, AW posts do show up. Every once in a while, I have to wince.

stormie said:

Yes, my byline was there, but I should have been asked first. I mean, this piece can be sold for second or reprint rights. It took me awhile to find out whom to contact, but when I did, I emailed the owner of the site asking that it be removed. She obliged.

Click to expand...

It's the people who steal your stuff without crediting you that the google search won't help.

Oops. I googled my name and my blog came up and the very first example of it is my dissing of my son's teacher.

I hope she isn't googling me.

Click to expand...

LOL!! I've had "people" in my life google me to see if I'm really a writer, to see if I lie, and to see if I'm bad mouthing them, so I try to keep rants to myself as much as possible.

It's also interesting to see how your pages change. For example, yesterday when I started googling, my books Fictionwise page came up number one. Now it's my book trailer. It lets me know what's working and what people are looking at.

Click to expand...

This interests me, too - the last time I googled, a lot of weird links I haven't even thought of in years popped up. Then, when I just did a minute ago, a bunch of interviews and the Just Hit Send thread were all topping the list. Interesting. People must be digging into my history??

Shadow_Ferret said:

Oops. I googled my name and my blog came up and the very first example of it is my dissing of my son's teacher.

I hope she isn't googling me.

Click to expand...

Ouch. This is a very interesting thread. (-; I only post my writing on my blog...and only stuff I have no intention of publishing.

My favorite is to see my name listed on someone else's blog who then asks "Why do they all have names that sounds like porn stars???"

*sigh*

Because my parents thought it was funny.

I also get a lot of Buffy the Vampire Killer sites.

I really enjoying seeing my name pop up associated with things from my childhood, like a "Letter to the Editor" for a comic book, or my first published "fanfics" way back in the 70s long before Al Gore even created the Internet.

My favorite hit the other day was this one to a Tiffany Fan site:

http://www.tiffany.org/forum/nicemail001.html

1996? I thought that would've been long gone. LOL

I once googled my on-line name and discovered that someone had plagiarised 4 of my blog entries. It's the only time anything of mine has been plagiarised and I've never really understood why they'd want to take my mundane accounts of days spent feeling tired and living with horny flatmates as their own.

With my real name, I Google it every few weeks to see what's out there and apart from a mention on a college boyfriend's blog (actually, more of a rant of women who'd dumped him, which reminded me exactly why I had dumped him) there's nada.

But Stormie's advice is still good.

MM

This actually paid off for me last week -- I do periodically check my name on Google to see where my work might be ending up, and I found a piece that I'd originally submitted to a magazine in August 2006 has been published on their website. I'd never been notified or paid in any way, though that's a convoluted story -- we moved about 5 weeks after I submitted that story, and apparently the USPS forwarding never worked properly. I contacted the magazine and was told that they'd sent a contract, but the online editor was never told they hadn't gotten it returned and signed.

Long story short: because I googled for my byline, I'll be seeing the check shortly.

Well that was weird.

I googled Shadow Ferret and on the second page I came upon this:

http://shadow-ferret.stumbleupon.com/

Says Shadow Ferret is a 17 year old guy from somewhere in New York, but he's using an icon I created 12 years ago when I first came online!

Weird!!!

I didn't even know what icons were, let alone that the existed, when I first came online in 1994. LOL I was still trying to figure out what newsgroups and chatrooms were!

So far, I haven't caught anyone stealing my stuff. I can't think why anyone would want to, really! But actually I have four permutations of my name online:

Firstname Maiden Name
Nickname Maiden Name
Firstname Married Name
Nickname Married Name

Firstname Maiden Name is the worst because it pops up with a bunch of fanfic I wrote when I was in high school. Totally humiliating. Although oddly enough another person of the same name seems to have appeared lately. She's an aspiring actress in some minor roles. I wonder how she feels about having written nerdy fanfic.

Nickname Maiden Name is the best as far as publishing credits go because it comes up with a list of Amazon links for this nonfiction guidebook I wrote. I'm actually kinda ticked off about that one because they were supposed to use my full name and I told them several times, and they still printed it with my nickname. Grr.

And then Nickname Married Name is great for any professional writing because it's the name I use with the travel company I work for. The number one ranking is this very big time marketing blog that used a newsletter I did as a positive example. It's also the name I used on a bit of voicework I did for my husband's company, so that shows up too.