A Brian By Any Other Name
September 3rd, 2009 Brian HerzogDid you read recently about MIT's Personas tool, that visualizes what the internet knows about you? The profile for my name looks like this (click for bigger):
Interesting, but what does it mean? I'm not quite sure. Especially when I realized it grouped all Brian Herzogs together.
Which reminded me there's more than one Brian Herzog out there. Of course, there's lots of us on MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn (but not me on the first two), and I'm following all the Brian Herzogs on Twitter, just to see what I was up to.
Occasionally I look myself up on WhitePages to remember past addresses I've had, and recently (?) they added a neat national name distribution map, to show where I am most densely populated (I'm the only me in MA). ZabaSearch links to a compilation of my past addresses - well, some of them, and some listed weren't mine (I know this is their business, but I was surprised to see it - it must come from Post Office Change Of Address forms?).
In the spirit of Me or Not Me?, I started pulling together all of the Me Brian Herzog information out there at herzogbr.net. Also, here's a few Not Me Brian Herzogs:
- Violin and Viola Teacher
- Founder of Frontline Energy
- Triathlete
- The man in charge of the money
- Director of Security Marketing at Sun Microsystems
- Tennis Player?
- Race Car
- Professional maven and sneezer
And finally, here's a few other name-related/internet-profile bits and bobs:
- From GrowABrain, the story of Angela Shelton who wrote a Finding Angela Shelton about her meeting 40 other Angela Sheltons
- A Single Serving Website that tells you whattheinternetknowsaboutyou.com (based on your browser history - clear out those caches!)
- from HowManyOfMe.com:
HowManyOfMe.com 
There are 
people with my name in the U.S.A.
Give it a try - find out how much can be found about you and not yous.
