Internet vanities

The Internet is a place full of vanity. Perhaps this is a sign of the times, or alternatively it`s what we humans do in any social space that we`re trying to occupy and make our own: we try to embed into it as many things that are of our own making as possible. The converse of this is also true: we spend a lot of time finding instances and traces of ourselves on the Net.

Perhaps the Net already knows about you...

Witness, for instance, how obsessed we were during the past few years with submitting the URLs of our Web pages to search engines. Visibility, we thought, was directly related to how close to the top of a search results page our own page appeared. "Above the line" in this context, took on a whole new meaning - if you were among the top 10 matches in any search engine, your site, it was thought, was likely to be seen.

Of course, now most of us know that`s not the way to get your Web site noticed. It requires a complex set of interrelationships, established through careful marketing, branding, PR and other efforts. However, the Internet hasn`t turned into an entirely commercialised environment yet. In addition to the considered professional efforts of creating exposure for a Web site, good old-fashioned values such as well-maintained niche content and the like also play an important role. The message, as far as creating visibility for your site is concerned, remains that you can make it on your own, but it`s easier and more effective to enlist the help of a bunch of good online marketers.

Vanity, on the other hand, has moved on to greater heights, and I think it`s interesting to note that a lot of Net newbies will type their name into a search engine. Those with run-of-the-mill Anglo-Saxon names are surprised at how often "their" name comes up - what they don`t realise is that there are 250 million people in the US alone, and there are bound to be many Robert Smiths (apologies to any real Robert Smiths out there). But it`s tempting, isn`t it? Perhaps the Net already knows about you...

For those who have been Netizens for a couple of years, it`s also a frequently amusing sport to search for traces of themselves on the Web. Fact is, over the years one accumulates a lot of "digital debris" about oneself. While digital traces aren`t particularly stable (unlike paper, interestingly) and disappear after an alarmingly short period of time, the hope is that someone, somewhere, will find your personal Web page and make contact. In a sense, searching the engines for one`s name is a moment of affirmation: I`m still out here, is anybody else? It becomes the reverse of a first contact scenario.

The height of personal vanity on the Internet is registering one`s own domain name. For a few years now, personal .com and .net domains have proliferated alarmingly in Netland, so much so that the network authorities have been grappling with the problem of how to deal with ever-growing (and ever less efficient) worldwide DNS tables.

In the vast majority of cases, those registering vanity or surname domains don`t actually need a domain at all. To go with those big brand product manufacturers who, two or three years ago - in the days before big brand company Web sites - frantically registered their names on the Net, home users are now also protecting their "brands" online by registering their family names as Internet domains. The use of this, apart from vanity, isn`t particularly clear to me. Even with a surname as strange as mine, there are more than 20 unique people, all of whom I`m sure I`m not related to, listed in whowhere.com`s white pages.

The Web has become a place of vanity -- the realm of the online vanity number plate. As so often, real life paradigms are transferred into the online world. They`re transformed in the process. Whether that makes our human foibles any more acceptable, I`ll leave for the reader to decide. I, for one, seem to come up only a few times in the common search engines, and most of those instances are ageing content. Soon, there`ll be no more digitally immortal Carsten Knoch. Good thing, probably.