One of the side effects of being a blogger is being overly obsessed over how Google indexes your "presence" on the Web, whether your blog(s), articles, name, links, profiles, footprints, etc… And when I say obsession, I mean to the point where one needs to join BA (Blogoholic Anonymous) and GA (Googoholic Anonymous).
Every so often, I’d enter "shanghaitechwriter" in Google search engine to see what kind of results get indexed. I figured that I’m the only person in the world that uses "shanghaitechwriter" (one long word), whether in the form of user registration or direct URL links to my blog. So I expect all the search results to be about me. And I was right.
Google indexed seven pages of results about me. Now that I’ve said it out loud, there just might be a few shanghaitechwriter wannabes or imposters out there starting from today. I better go and register every social networking website to secure my name / branding! (And you’re probably thinking what a egocentric self-absorbed prick blogger I am!)
Well, like I (and many others before me) said, blogging could be the best thing you do to grow in your career. That’s if, the results return good (and not embarrassing things) about you.
In any case, there was one search result that caught my attention. It was a PDF file with my name and URL in the excerpt. In the result source URL, it was an STC website. So of course, curiosity got to me and I wanted to see what this link was and why my name was in it.
The PDF file was the July edition newsletter from the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicator in the United Kingdom. In the newsletter, there was a section devoted to blogging news. One of the articles I wrote earlier this year, Typical Day as a Technical Writer at NI Shanghai, was featured among the ranks of other famous bloggers in the technical writing profession! I recognized all of the other bloggers because I subscribe to their feed! What a pleasant surprise to see my name placed in a piece of history. It’s like reading the newspaper one morning and seeing a picture of you next to Barack Obama, even if it was only a picture of your right shoulder / arm. It’s still you!
That’s one clipping I won’t throw away, thus another post for my blog. More stuff for Google to index.
Happy blogging!
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September 4th, 2008 at 4:19 am
You are welcome and don’t be surprised if you are featured again in the future. The crop of technical writing blogs is still rather sparse, and I’m wary of constantly linking to the ‘big names’ as it were… (I felt bad enough including a link to my OWN blog in last months newsletter!).