An Outside Perspective

Ego surfing.  I'm sure everyone has done it at some point.  Inputting your own name into the mainstream search engines such as Google or Bing and looking at the results.  Usually people find out information about a "John Smith" living in Alaska instead of themselves.  For me, however, this process didn't reveal too many new and exciting details since my name isn't quite so popular.  If I searched my own name on Google, I'd find my Facebook profile, my Twitter account, and a few other things associated with me.  Out of the results, I knew that 99% of them existed.  The other 1% was made up of another "me" that made a few random forum postings, but overall, nothing too impressive.  However, I thought that it would be quite interesting if someone that didn't know me were to look at these results.  They would probably be able to tell that I played tennis in high school due to some old newspaper articles highlighting scores of my past matches.  They would also be able to tell that I'm associated with "Hoo's Woods" (a local bird of prey education center) since I created an entire website about the organization.  It was interesting to find that someone could get to know your interests and hobbies just by searching your name on the internet.

While I was pretty satisfied with the results of my surfing, I was a little disappointed to know that the Dalton Miatke I saw on the internet isn't the person that I want people to know.  One of my goals for this semester is to change that.  Seeing as how my profession of choice is within the gaming industry, I would like to create a more gaming/tech-oriented profile of myself.  I want to associate myself with the industry and start the process of being involved in the social media world.  Another goal of mine is to just become more educated.  Looking at that list of people on the first day of class, I felt that I should have known more than I did.  By keeping up to date with everything going on and establishing a routine of checking sites such as "Mashable" and updating Twitter and Facebook daily, I hope to become more knowledgeable about social media in general.  I'm definitely looking forward to all that this course has to offer.