Yesterday I considered deleting my blog and trying to become one of the unGoogleable elite. Of course, with my job, I can’t be ungoogleable. I probably couldn’t remove all trace of my blog from the internet, either, even though I could remove it from the server(s) and ask archive.org to remove it – there’d still be traces, I’m sure. And probably, after a few weeks, I’d change my mind anyway and want my blog back.

You see, I’m struggling to finish an article about the virtues of research blogging. I think the cause of my intense desire to disappear my blog is the image that came from nowhere of a future reader of this as yet unfinished article thinking doing a search for my blog, finding nothing, and writing an article (or blog post) in response about the irony of one of the early proponents of research blogging being ungoogleable in 2007.

Kind of like when Michael Joyce, father of hypertext fiction, decided not to have a web identity anymore.

Gotta be an early adopter, ya know. And unGoogleability might be the next bit thing.

17 thoughts on “the response a future reader will write

  1. Elin

    What happened to your trackbacks? I’ve written something about this here and wanted to do a track back~!

    I personally think you’d be bored if you couldn’t share with us all:-)

  2. Jose Angel

    Early adopters, early adapters… To twist a phrase, “the early bird doesn’t get the Google worm”…
    But even if you drop away from the web people are going to talk about you, you know.

  3. Jill

    Oh, I’ve made that adaptor/adopter mistake before. Ah well. Worm? Oh, and Elin, I’ve no idea, they should work but often don’t and I dunno why and though I like trackbacks, I do, I don’t have the energy to figure it out. Kind of like the comment field which is really inconvenient.

  4. Chris

    Ungoogleablity being cool? Never..that is the people who cant be googled trying to make themselves feel better 🙂

  5. Oliver Wrede

    I think the easiest and 100% effective way to get unGoogleable is to change your name and follow some of the advices given on this page. It boils down to getting a new life – which potentially is easier to do than to wipe the net completely. 😉

  6. Jill

    Hm. Kaye Trammell is also blogging less now that she’s no longer a grad student. Not because she doesn’t like blogging, but, well, actually she’s not quite sure why, it seems.

    I’m really rather struggling with finishing this (overdue) article. A lot of resistance there. What, exactly, does that mean? Perhaps I’ll stop writing about blogging. Blogging is. My research is on other things.

  7. Elin

    That’s probably exactly it, Jill:-)

  8. Elin

    Have you seen this by the way? Why I hate weblogs

  9. J. Nathan Matias

    Of course, becoming ungoogleable is only one way to avoid the problems of the ‘net world. My solution? Saturate the system with information authored *by me* so I am the authoritative source on myself. Lazy people won’t look beyond the first page. I thus have a lot of power in defining who I am considered to be.

    No, I don’t think of this in a conniving, scheming way. But I am encouraged by the fact that there so so much good information about me that I don’t need to worry about someone faking me.

  10. torill

    When you stop enjoying this, you should stop doing it. The weblog was about having fun sharing and receiving, and if you these days feel you spend more time sharing than receiving through this channel, then it’s time to stop. You’ll be missed, and your google-rank may drop, and in a few years you will think about your blog and shudder at the thought of what you wrote here, but by then it won’t really matter.

    Do what you like, Jill. It gives the best results.

  11. J. Nathan Matias

    >>Do what you like, Jill. It gives the best results.

    Agreed.

    But I would like to point out something:

    If you become one of the ungoogleable elite, what good is that? Who will know? 🙂

  12. AndrÈ-S-C

    Will your article also look at some of the evils ?

  13. Jill

    See, that’s kind of hte problem with the article.

    And yeah, do what I like. And you’re right Nathan, it’d suck if nobody knew my success at being ungoogleable 😉

  14. Erik

    Remove your site from google.

  15. Jill

    Oh. Uh. Well, see, I don’t really want to do that….

    Damn. You got me.

  16. Andre S C

    on the topic of Privacy, we’ve just locally launched something called eyespy, I designed the site for it, for a relativly expensive sms the idea is that the coresponding vehicle will be located

  17. Andre S C

    the interesting question is perhaps if that poster will be google-able ;- )

Leave a Reply to Jose Angel Cancel reply

Recommended Posts

Triple book talk: Watch James Dobson, Jussi Parikka and me discuss our 2023 books

Thanks to everyone who came to the triple book talk of three recent books on machine vision by James Dobson, Jussi Parikka and me, and thanks for excellent questions. Several people have emailed to asked if we recorded it, and yes we did! Here you go! James and Jussi’s books […]

Image on a black background of a human hand holding a graphic showing the word AI with a blue circuit board pattern inside surrounded by blurred blue and yellow dots and a concentric circular blue design.
AI and algorithmic culture Machine Vision

Four visual registers for imaginaries of machine vision

I’m thrilled to announce another publication from our European Research Council (ERC)-funded research project on Machine Vision: Gabriele de Setaand Anya Shchetvina‘s paper analysing how Chinese AI companies visually present machine vision technologies. They find that the Chinese machine vision imaginary is global, blue and competitive.  De Seta, Gabriele, and Anya Shchetvina. “Imagining Machine […]

Do people flock to talks about ChatGPT because they are scared?

Whenever I give talks about ChatGPT and LLMs, whether to ninth graders, businesses or journalists, I meet people who are hungry for information, who really want to understand this new technology. I’ve interpreted this as interest and a need to understand – but yesterday, Eirik Solheim said that every time […]