Reflections, mid-publish

The Google Twin article has done its thing in print nationally (meaning all-but-Toronto), online (meaning, you know, here), and will be put into ink for Toronto next Saturday.

And that means things are afoot!

As I had anticipated, there is fresh controversy over the validity of my Wikipedia listing. As I am now learning for another article on what makes a person wiki-worthy, there are certain guidelines of "notability" that a person has to have if their Wikipedia entry is to stay up.

I knew I would probably fly under the radar until the article went to print, and, as I suspected, I was sitting pretty until it went online/in the paper on Saturday. Now it has been flagged as not having enough documentation to prove my already questionable notability, but the kind and helpful Alan K'necht is helping to sort that out (without my even asking! He is a wonderful soul!), as am I. He was also kind enough to mention the whole ordeal (and thus, continue to pump up this BG!) on his blog.

I won't be heartbroken if my Wikipedia entry falls away. It was an interesting experiment while it lasted. But, as my colleague Jenny Wagler says, Wiki will be sorry when I do become (significantly) more notable one day and they have to start from scratch.

Interestingly, even as they say in one breath that I'm questionably notable, they quote me in another. My Google Twin article is actually referenced in the Wikipedia Signpost newsroom.

Also, shout out to Donna B. from Ottawa who sent me props on the article via Facebook! It's always nice (and certainly not the norm) to get positive feedback about things we write, and it seems she has a similar Googleganger predicament.

Countown, truly now

I hear through the grapevine of copy editors that this Google epic is finally going to print this weekend, thus hopefully pumping my online existence through the roof with all the curiosity it might pique from readers. Who are, at the very least, my mother. Perhaps my dad, if he can tear himself away from the Toronto Star.

My poor briannagoldberg.com has slipped into obscurity in Google rankings, but I'm pretty sure that's because I redirected it from the .com to my wordpress blog. I feel like Google wouldn't want to rate things that are just redirections.

I know there's some way to actually run a wordpress blog out of the .com, but it was taking me forever to figure out how and really, it's important the keep asking myself, "Do I REALLY need to do this?" as I spend hours tinkering away at my online self that, if the internet ever blooped down, would no longer exist.

I think it's probably worth an hour or two more, to get myself together since people that read the article might potentially (hopefully) visit it and offer me book deals and television series and whatnot. I mean, recognize my fantastic journalism. Because that's a reward in itself.

So off I go to reinvent briannagoldberg.com and muse on what I'd do with my own television series. I'm pretty sure it would involve me playing banjo.

The disappearing briannagoldberg.com

And then it was gone again.

How is it that Google can index my poor little occasionally invisible briannagoldberg.com, and then sometimes not show it? It gets lonely out there in the webisphere when it's not acknowledged... especially since I'm paying for it.

The good news is that all my little social networking attempts are really truly starting to fall into place (before I was just trying to make myself feel better about it, but now it is a fact), and thus I'm now fairly consistently the hits on pages one through three (yeah!).

My Linked In remains elusive, and my Wikipedia entry is still number two. But it's nice to know that all those hours making user names and passwords I have already forgotten for my multiple socially networked selves is somehow paying off.

Today will be spent working on a multimedia project based on my interview with Jim Killeen, the producer that made the doc Google Me, where he met with several of his other selves. I like listening to that interview over and over as I work on it because he is such a positive fellow. He seems quite glad to share his identity. While I am getting there myself, I feel I still have a lot to learn from him.

Dr. Katie says

I was telling my friend in medical school about this whole experiment yesterday.

The story gets shorter and shorter every time I mention it to people, but I did leave in the detail that The Other Brianna Goldberg posted on her Wikipedia user page (the one that remains above my own WikiEntry) that she suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder.

"That's so borderline," she said.

My friend the soon-to-be-doctor explained that those who are Borderline tend to crave attention, and that might explain why there is just so much autobiographical material from The Other Brianna Goldberg on the internet... why there's so many of her Google Rankings that I'm fighting to win over.

Because, while I do have the top spot, I am still only eight out of ten.

The experiment continues.