Despite the fact that I had intended to get an early night, and midnight was fast approaching, I decided to Google myself. I haven’t done it for a while… it’s very interesting insight into one’s achievements. A majority of the links are actually related to me, except a couple which implicate that of my namesakes, one lived somewhere around the end of the 19th century, one appears to have something to do with a Scandinavian country and one works for an ABTA approved travel agency. Another one works for a Primary Care Trust (i.e. NHS) up north, and in November 2005 won the staff lottery. Well done! There was also a listing for one of my namesakes related to CPPIH… I thought this was probably a very clever namesake with some kind of financial qualification (it sounds like the kind of letters uttered by my friends who are in finance when talking about work related qualifications) until I discovered that it was most probably actually referring to me. I had not gained a qualification and forgotten all about it, but I had been involved in the Commission for Public and Patient Involvement in Health a few years back.

Apart from being involved in the CPPIH I discovered I have a website (okay I didn’t discover it at all, I obviously am aware I have a website, which is in desperate need of an update!). I have a public profile on bebo (which has been quickly converted to private), and lead me to discover lots of friend requests, which was quite nice of people to want me to be their friends. However I only accepted the ones from people I know.

Some of the other highlights were as follows. I am on my university course website with my degree work. I created a website for the book my brother-in-law wrote and my sister is currently publishing. I contributed to a sculpture community forum, my university course (unofficial) forum, even contributed my thoughts on the farepak scandal of last year and, it seems, in my very early days of internet browsing wished a member of the band Eternal a happy birthday on their forum.

Probably the thing that generated the most results was being the Vice President in the Students Union. Google acknowledges the website I created for Student Reps, and a new link I hadn’t noticed before shows that because of this website I am referenced in Ulster Universities Best Practice for Student Representation document (along with a good number of other people, but still it’s nice to be referenced). I also was reminded that I had written at least one newsletter to my Student Reps, I feature in a Project Plan template for Personal Development Plans and in a Community Radio application form. There are also two newspaper articles I am quoted in, which is interesting as I never spoke to the newspaper in question once during my elected period, and one of them is most blatantly a reason for a liable case (a very boring one) if I could have been bothered at the time.

And that is not all. ‘No’ I hear you cry, there can’t be more. Well there is. I feature in an article in the International Journal of Art & Design because of a piece of art work I did in sixth form (I have to come clean about purposely trying to mislead you in my last statement. To be more precise, my art work was in said journal because my teacher had written an article on teaching methods, and my art work was one of a few examples of this method).

I’m not quite sure what my Google results say about me as a person, but there could be a much worse selection of links produced… or I could be overshadowed by many more people if I had a more common name, just like one of my friends who seems to share a name with a very prolific character in the world of Stilton cheesemaking. If you type his name followed by the words ‘stilton’ and ‘cheese’ you get almost 400 hits… I will never be overshadowed by a namesake of mine by that scale, and at the moment I am the overshadower of my namesakes in the world of Google, that has to be some kind of achievement in itself.