Ego-Surfing

Tonight I indulged in a time-honored tradition, ego-surfing--where you google your name. I didn't google my own name, but the name of this website, "Thriceberg". As it is this site mostly sits here, taking up space. In a few months it should start to take off content-wise. That said, I've been wondering if I should register a new domain. There is a reason for the name "Thriceberg" but that reason is all but extinct. It still has usefulness, however, when I want to sign up for some web service such as twitter and I don't want to spend a half an hour having all variants of my name and hobbies being rejected because they've already been taken by some other user. In addition, it's nice to be able to type in "thriceberg" and have 99% of the posts have some relation to me.

I'm shocked at how much is out there. 4,170 results (shut up, that's a big number to me), most of them, I'd wager, created by bots. It's amazing how many sites exist that just catalog other site's material. A great number of the sites I found made notes of things I'd tweeted in the past. Not a blog post commenting on it, just re-posting it in some category on their (I'm assuming) bot-driven site in order to increase their page ranking.

After the bot-sites, there are a few video-sites that linked to old videos I used to have online. Only 3 in total, those videos used to be on this site. I took them down for various reasons, though I'm sure someday I'll tighten them up a bit and throw them back online. Since most of these sites embedded these videos from Revver, and they're no longer on Revver, the result was Google linking me to a bunch of empty pages. Not Google's fault.

A few mentions my of Team Fortress 2 tweets, some apparently non-existent mentions on a Zune site (I own a Zune, thriceberg is my user name with them). A handful of blog comments, not too many. Actually, now that I think of it there are some comments I've made recently that I would have expected to top the search. It took a while before this site was the top result when searching the word 'thriceberg,' and Google still thinks it's a misspelling. Personal goal: become so popular Google suggests "Did you mean 'Thriceberg'?" when people search for 'the iceberg,' instead of the other way around.

I found two comments on two posts on a blog called "Paleo-Future," attributed to a "thriceberg," and for the life of me I can't remember if I posted them. I saw a lot of old message boards I have accounts with, but the reasons for those accounts all came back to me. I suppose I could have followed a link from Boing Boing or something to this site, and decided to comment. Both are comments I could have written, although there is a lack of proper capitalization that I don't think I was capable of at the time. They seem vaguely familiar, but I'm really not sure.

Well, those comments are from 2007, and I've had this domain for...going on three years now? 3 years at least, and I've been using the name thriceberg for longer. I didn't dig too far in the search results, only a dozen pages or so, but that's all I saw I couldn't discern as either something from me or referring to me. Where was I in 2007? I refuse to even try to remember. There's too much for me to do tonight as it is.

My primary concern with using the name "Thriceberg," is that people won't immediately see it for what it is--a play on the word 'iceberg'. People may think it's two words and mentally try to break it up. I don't really have a reason for it, so I'm sure people will keep asking me what it means and I won't have an answer. Okay, I've officially decided to come up with an interesting lie that explains the name.

I've also decided to keep this domain as my primary one for now. That's official, too. People have done better with worse names, and at least this name is unique. I think, anyway.

Would you guess that I have a tendency to over-think things? Oh, you're too kind.

David