Life, the Universe and the Internet

Whenever I set up a new site, one of the first things I do is set up Google Alerts for the site name, for those not familiar a google alert is an email google can send you when they discover a web page that mentions the subject you’ve specified. I use to find out who’s talking about or linking back to my sites.

So today I set up alerts for this site but the difference here is the site is in my name so I’m basically setting up alerts for my name. Within an hour of setting up the alert I’ve been inundated with alerts for completely off topic pages which are basically people with the same name as me. So far I’ve discovered a barrister, a photographer, an ex man united footballer and someone who worked on the sound editing of some big films including star wars, all of whom have the same name as me.

I’ve refined the alert now as I’m bored of hearing about other Steve Kinsey’s out there, but I guess the point of this post is to say that I’ve really learned a lesson today about being careful when setting up these things to make sure that I really focus on what data I actually want to see as it’s very easy to go totally off topic.