(Ego trip ahead — skip if you want!) A passtime of mine, in very idle moments (actually, mostly idle moments at work…) is to see what percentage of hits on google for my name actually correspond to me (as opposed to someone with the same name).

I used to have an excellent record here: when I was at university, and filing Debian bug reports every week, not to mention PrBoom releases, nearly every reference would be to me. It dropped to a low of around 50% two years ago. In particular, there's some Dr Colin Phipps who works for an oil company, who gets mentioned in a lot of press releases who is my main competitor — he holds the top spot on google for now. But I am back up to 83% at the moment (looking at the first 3 pages (30 links) on Google, which is fairly good I think. But then my surname is hardly common; anyone with the surname Smith has my sympathy.

Sadly, all of this is based on memory, so from now on I am going to keep a record of the percentage of references to me in the first 30 hits, and track it.