Enough of the online anonymity
I used to blog, a while back.
I mean, in internet terms, it was positively prehistoric times. The first entry on my previous site (and yes, I have just checked this) was posted in 2002. I managed to stick with it reasonably regularly, apparently, until late 2007.
Then something went wrong. I think that, by that point, I was spending considerably more time at my previous employers – The Herald – and, frankly, I had lost interest in spending my free time writing when I was spending all day dealing with words already. But anyway, three entries in two-and-a-half years does not a blog make. It doesn't even make a LiveJournal, for goodness' sake, and they're mainly just bad emo poetry.
Then, late one Friday evening when I should have been out doing something much less constructive with my time, something hit me. Years and years ago – before even the old blog! – I was, briefly, involved in one of the earliest internet radio stations. It was called Livewire, and it involved a group of about a dozen people broadcasting to, generally, fewer than a dozen people. It consumed far too much of my life for about six months before the law – or, more precisely, the money men – started catching up with anyone doing online radio and we realised we couldn't afford to keep going. I'm sure at least one person, somewhere, was devastated (though I've never met them).
I like to think that this small group was, in some way, ahead of its time. Now, nobody thinks twice about listening to music online. I personally use Spotify every day, and have a rather brilliant internet radio in my kitchen that tunes into whatever station I want, worldwide. But anyway, that's not the point here. I had completely lost touch with all but one of this merry band. What were they up to now?
Google, as always, was my friend. Appropriately enough, three of our finest presenters (I don't pretend I was one of the finest by any stretch) are now DJs on various radio stations in the UK – two at breakfast, one at drivetime. One, who designed our early websites, has written an amazing system that now powers the sites of loads of stations (and he's done a fair bit of presenting, too). One seems to have worked as a newsreader on pretty much every station in the country and is now breakfast editor on another station (working, confusingly, under a pseudonym). Two more work in PR.
I have no intention of going on some huge, Danny Wallace-esque crusade to track them all down, or anything like that. I suspect that might be a bit weird, creepy, stalkerish etc. But then I tried to find myself (I'm sure we've all done this at some time. No? Just me? OK). That did not go well. In fact, it was page 47 before I found the correct David Bennett. Page 47. (Out of interest, I then Googled 47 and the image to the right came up. I'm genuinely not making that up. She was a Miss Russia contestant, apparently. So it seemed rude not to include it.)
Before me was David Bennett, the senior banker (fnarr fnarr) – a "bright, pragmatic kind of guy", apparently. That could be me! There was David Bennett the butcher, and his son, who are based in Dunblane (I have actually had my picture taken outside of their shop. Try their mince. I just made that up, I don't know what it's like, I didn't go in).
I found David Bennett the lawyer, David Bennett the photographer, David Bennett the professor at Aston Business School (Birmingham, apparently) and David Bennett the member of staff at King's College London who researches something so clever I don't even understand what it is. David Bennett III was in The Legend of the Lone Ranger, according to IMDB (his popularity's up 8% this week). Sadly, I also found an independent report into the death of a David Bennett in a hospital in 1998.
What I did not find, anywhere, was me. Well, as I say, I found myself on page 47, but people tend to have given up by then.
Initially, my online anonymity was somewhat deliberate – when I was working full-time, first in Dumfries, then Paisley, and latterly at The Herald, I didn't particularly want my bosses to be reading my online ramblings. But now I run a web design company (we're called fuzzylime, by the way. I like to think we're rather good). I should be findable. And, more importantly, for the first time ever, I want to be findable.
So, this blog is a number of things. Thing 1: It's going to be somewhere for me to pass on various (entertaining, I hope) tales. Thing 2: It's going to serve as some kind of vague search-engine experiment, to see if I can actually get myself anywhere near the top for people searching for David Bennett, or some variation thereof. Thing 3: Well, I haven't actually thought of one yet. I'll get to that.
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