Comments on: Ears Burning? Vanity Check Blogging

By: Yvonne Adams

Yvonne Adams — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 17:18:19 +0000

I just have to use my whole name and remember that I’m not a watercolor painter or antiques dealer. If I just use Yvonne, I have to compete with DiCarlo and the trannie site.

By: Nicole Simon

Nicole Simon — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 08:46:12 +0000

Hey, you can make it. Nicole is not a very uncommon name, and I am doing quite fine ;))

By: Michael Moncur

Michael Moncur — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 01:10:56 +0000

I always feel sorry for people with names like “John Smith” – it must make vanity-checking much more difficult than if you were Darren Rowse or Michael Moncur. Word to the wise: if your own name isn’t very unique, choose a unique blog name.

I find that Bloglines’ search for my name works much better than Pubsub–I get about 10 alerts on Bloglines for every one on Pubsub, and the latter are often a few days late.

By: Darren

Darren — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 23:09:50 +0000

LOL Danger – actually I’m number 9 and 10 for two of my other blogs also – although I’ve slipped down the rankings for them because I actually used to hold the number one position until Darren Barefoot started blogging and til Darren Hayes released his latest album! Not that I ever check these things! :-)

By: Danger Stevens

Danger Stevens — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 22:01:46 +0000

Heh, ProBlogger is number 12 when you Google “Darren”. It’s just a matter of time.

By: Andy

Andy — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 15:19:41 +0000

PubSub.com is another engine where you can set up alerts ahead of time. I have a few set up for my name, the charity I work for and some others. It also had quite an interesting LinkRanks section but it's been offline for several months now, ever since an influx of rather dubious websites seemed to inflitrate its algorithms!

By: Darren

Darren — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 12:50:56 +0000

Thanks Duncan – fixed.

Good tips Fitzgerald and Nicole!

By: Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 12:43:02 +0000

I use Bloglines and Technorati’s watch list together. The watch list are delivered as an RSS Feed which can be subscribed to on Bloglines.

By: Duncan

Duncan — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 12:14:10 +0000

The sitemeter link isn’t working

By: Nicole Simon

Nicole Simon — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 12:00:11 +0000

Google Alerts is another example, which works quite well. I have written about this before – in Germany we do have blogstats.de which does a much better job than Technorati & co – it is kind of disappointing to have less information that I expected. You know, big world and better tools and all those things.

Google Alerts on web and Technorati work best, if you have a uniq thing people will quote you on – I think problogger is a very good term for that.. I suspect you will be in a few months ‘the darren’ and can then be found by just entering Darren ;))