Googling

Ever perform web searches on yourself? I'd recommend it... if I were hiring you - I'd do it. I recently decided to take it a half-step further and set up Google Alerts for my name... both "james halberg" and "jim halberg". Interesting what it comes back with.

For a few days there I also had them set up for "monnie halberg" and "monica halberg". I set them up thinking it would be fun to let Monnie know what was out there about her but it very quickly began to feel like spying - or maybe more accurately "eavesdropping" on conversations that, while available to me, weren't intended for me.

I've been getting lots of stuff about the Halberg Awards. Any time there's a story involving some guy named Jim - and the Halberg Awards: I hear about it.

One thing I'm glad I found out (although it's annoying to get an alert about it everyday) is that "Star Academy" is evidently attempting to publish Seeking Alpha articles on their site by republishing our email... to put it kindly: they aren't doing a very good job of it. So the end result is my email address and what basically amounts to an error message published as an "article" out on their site every day or two. It's been happening for several weeks now... yuck.

It always tells me when I publish something to a blog online (in case I didn't realize I just hit publish). Occasionally it'll tell me that someone referred to me in their blog - which is nice. The most fun though was probably this one returned for "james halberg": Dad, they're after you! You're listed in the "Lost Alumni" section of the NMU Albumi Newsletter!

I've also recently noticed a lot of change in what you get as the most popular results for googling "Jim Halberg" lately. Not that that's a bad thing - just kind of unusual since normally there's not a ton of activity there. One of the things that has recently become wildly popular is looking at my old Blogger profile for jameshalberg.blogspot.com. I haven't blogged there in quite sometime but apparently people like to go look anyway... or could it be that Blogger is part of Google?... nah, that's crazy.

I was happy to see that morecowbell.info and madison.com/post/blogs/cowbell both make the first page of a search on "morecowbell". No love on a search for "more cowbell" though - that's alright, we haven't been going long.

Go Google yourself. Google your work. And if you really want to stick your nose where it doesn't belong - go check out the record of your WI friends :)

You might be surprised at what you find!