contentious.com

Ego surfing: Every net user does it, either occasionally or obsessively. For me, it’s a routine daily task that I handle automatically through a collection of search feeds (that’s an OPML file) which clue me in to new online postings or conversations where my name or my projects have popped up.

My ego-surfing search feeds recently delivered a couple of gems which display some intriguing intricacies of name-based ego surfing…

First of all, ego surfing is easier if you have an unusal name.

In my case, my last name (Gahran) is fairly unusual. (Here’s how to pronounce it.) Pretty much anyone who has that last name is related to me somehow – and none of my relatives, on my father’s side at least, appear to be nearly the online maniac I am. So searching any search engine (like Google) or feed aggregation service (like Technorati) for “Gahran” will mostly yield references to me.

However, people often misspell my last name – usually substituting the more common “Graham” (especially when I’m making restaurant reservations), but also sometimes mispelling it as “Garhan.” Blogger Garhan Attebury took note of this in a Feb. 9 posting, “Boredom Implies Dino-Jesus.”

It occurred to me, when I read Garhan’s posting, that perhaps this particular misspelling might be common enough that I should set up a search feed for it. That has proved interesting.

Here are some people who posted items relevant to me that I would have missed had I not been watching for this misspelling:

• Kami Huyse
• Will Richardson
• Matthew Stibbe
• Marnie Webb

Now, I’m not trying to poke fun at any of these bloggers – in fact, I appreciate that they mentioned me. I’m just saying that if I hadn’t kept an eye out for this common misspelling, I’d have missed what they said.

So if your name is frequently misspelled in a particular and somewhat unique way, it might be worth watching for that.

IN CONTRAST, MY FIRST NAME IS FAIRLY COMMON

I was amused to discover today that Kai Turner included me in his list of “Powerbloggers”. Here’s how he defines that distinction:

“The criteria for being a Powerblogger is to be the active author of a weblog ranked the highest by Google when searching for that author’s given name. And their given name must be one of the 10 most common names for a man or woman. I’ve used an American list of names, because (at the time) I could not find any other list of names based on current census rather than baby names. …”Falling short on Female Powerbloggers, I grabbed some of the top British women’s names for 3 more name searches…”

My first name, “Amy,” landed me on his list. (I had no idea that was a common British name!) I decided to check out his results. Honestly, I’d figured that “Amy” was so commonplace that it wasn’t worth Googling to see where I landed.

So just for the heck of it, I Googled “Amy.” Guess’s what I found (on the US version of Google, at the moment I happened to look): Contentious was #2 on Google! No kidding, here’s the screen grab. Wow, that surprised me!

I was outranked only by Amy Brown’s Fairy Art. That put me ahead of the Kevin Smith film Chasing Amy, singer Amy Grant, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, and Amy Ridenour of the National Center for Public Policy Research.

…At least temporarily. I’ve tried that search a couple of times since and the order of the results is slightly different each time, although I remained in the top 10 each time I searched.

Which goes to show, you can’t necessarily use a one-time search engine result to make a definitive statement about any site’s popularity or relevance. It varies moment by moment. So as gratified as I was to be listed as a “Powerblogger,” I don’t think it really means anything. Still, it’s fun.

And for me, fun is the name of the game online. Plus, it’s easy to spell.

(READ MORE about ego surfing tips at The Right Conversation.)