A few days back I posted that I'd set up a blogroll to list all the blogs our alums seemed to be turning out these days. One that had come to my attention was written by one of our recent alums who is now in law school. Let us call our alum Xavier, and the the blog "lawschoolbadblog". Xavier's blog appears to be very popular, in part for a tone I described as "splenetic" (another reader described it as little more than sour grapes).
But here's the catch. Lawschoolbadblog isn't written by our Xavier at all, but rather someone with the exact first and last name. So how did I come across it and assume it was Xavier? Our PG blog was getting hits that were coming from lawschoolbadblog; people who read it were then googling Xavier, and hitting our site (where Xavier had been mentioned in past). Moreover, Xavier had been blogging himself in past on a different site.
A few minutes ago I got an email from Xavier pointing out my error, and reminding me that I warned of just such a thing some posts ago. I quote my entry:
"Remember that any time you link out to another website, traffic from your site to that other URL will leave a record at the other end. So if you think your posts are private, but in the process link to an external site, the owner of that site can see where visitors have come from and work their way backward. Similarly, others may link to your site without asking permission, effectively advertising what had been a private site."
...and...
"Google yourself regularly to see what can be found by using different key words. I found, for example, that there's now a blog called "Patrick O'Neil's Pointed Pen" which is all about politics and has nothing to do with me. Sooner or later, though, someone will assume I'm the author."
So here's an interesting mix of these two forces at work; in this case lawschoolbadblog was clearly not private--it gets thousands of hits a day--and so I didn't bother to contact Xavier to ask permission to link. If I had, however, I'd soon found out it was a case of mistaken identity.
I am both chastened and reminded of the growing opportunities and confusions that emerge in the virtual world, where people hold multiple identities and unwillingly merge with that of others. Hence my use of pseudonyms for our alum and the mistaken blog--if I use the real ones, they'll only generate more mistaken traffic that links our alum to a blog that is not his.
Xavier, my apologies, and thanks for reminding me to heed my own advice!
Update: Our alum says all is forgiven and that I can even mention who it is, but now I'm gun/blog shy.
