Remotely Surprising

As an alternative to self-googling, I recently signed up for Google Alerts to keep track of myself online. Self-googling has often been lampooned as trivial and vain, but it's actually verging on necessary at this point given the scope of the online universe. If someone was talking shit or stealing shit, you'd want to know about it, right?

There have been no spectacular revelations thus far, but I was mildly intrigued by the most recent missive, which included links to a site called beeMP3 which creates a centralized catalog of MP3 files hosted elsewhere on the web and has evidently just gotten around to my domain. The site appears to be indiscriminate and the database quite large, so while I appreciate knowing that anyone Googling my name will now receive 4 results instead of 3, I'm not holding my breath as to whether it will help me reach more listeners. If nothing else, this situation has laid bare the inadequacy of my file naming system, which was by no means designed to be attractive in its own right. (who wants to listen to something called "quartet dakota 033007 2 Brazen mp3" anyway?)

Looking on the bright side, however, the cattle call nature of the site means that the artists are, for the most part, presented the same way, with no special treatment for the pop stars. In a world where self-googling is not only acceptable but passé, it's nice to know that I can go see my name lit up right next to Madonna's in order to get my vanity fix for the evening.