On the Internet, which would you rather have? One the one hand, people such as myself seek popularity on the Internet as a remedy for issues of self worth (as much as I hate to admit it, it’s true) and man-ego (I say man-ego because almost all the bloggers / popularity seekers I know online are guys). On the other hand, the idea of thousands of strangers knowing where I work, sleep, go to school– let alone my name– scares the fudge out of me.

Back in the day I thought I could have the best of both worlds by creating online identities unrelated to my real world identify and bringing those to Internet stardom. Unfortunately, thanks to the caching power of Google and other servers, it’s quite easy to piece together the real person from the breadcrumbs carelessly left over the years. Just search online for any of my “unique” nicknames (I’m not telling which ones) and you’ll find things from newspaper clippings to published papers with my real name on them.

Speaking of searches, I’m happy to say that Googling for my full name no longer brings up any link to myself (among the now 14,000,000 results) anywhere in the first ten pages of results (I checked). I used to be on the first page thanks to Princeton being high on Google’s pagerank, but now I’ve retreated back behind the shroud of anonymity. Or so I hope.

Another interesting search story– if you searched for images of Boa (name of a famous Korean singer) on Google or Yahoo a few months ago, this picture of me used to be on the first page. I was shocked when I first saw this, especially since I only posted that image on my blog once (years ago) and had never submitted my blog to search engines or anything. After the initial amusement, followed by fearful dread, I did some investigating and discovered that the picture was being posted on various kpop forums by random people I didn’t know. Scary, huh? Thankfully, that picture is now no longer anywhere near the top of the search results, thanks in part to (I think) the recent “Snakes on a Plane” movie, which made pictures of the actual snake more popular. (BTW, here’s an entertaining read related to the movie from the blog of a screenwriter, via ruach13.)

You might wonder, if anonymity is so important, why have a website at “stevec.qiguang.net?” Good question. I have no idea. Maybe I figure qiguang sounds random enough, plus it’s not registered as my real name or anything like that. As for stevec, well, there are millions of Steves out there, and C could be anything, like Steve Casablanca. At any rate, I’ve given up on trying to hide my identity 100%. I just have to keep reminding myself to not be careless about what I write and where I write it. And if I do that well enough, hopefully the identity thieves / stalkers out there will stay busy with the other less careful, more profitable, and definitely more interesting stevecs out there.