I wonder if google is indexing my journal?
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April 22nd, 2004 at 5:24 am
Easy enough to find out — ask it 🙂
There’s a checkbox somewhere in the setup for this thing that allows you to put a robots.txt file down so that it doesn’t index your journal.
April 22nd, 2004 at 6:50 am
Yes, unless you do what the previous commenter said.
At any rate, mine is.
I’ve thougth about this because among library professionals, there’s a growing trend for employers to google potential employees — and track down aliases — because library people are so web-post & blog happy, in general. So pretty much anything you might have said in public about the profession or your work, etc., is considered fair game. There have also been several controversies lately over people being told by current supervisors to stop talking about their libraries in their blogs, etc. Ironically, I have read about all this on the blogs in question. Interesting free speech issues, & good things to bear in mind as a blogger seeking employment, as well.
April 22nd, 2004 at 8:32 am
This is largely why I hit that checkbox. I’ve had more than a few potential employers show me either my webpage, any number of webpages linked to from my webpage or occasionally web archived email list discussions in the middle of interviews. To my knowledge this has never kept me from getting a job (as a sysadmin, so this is a cross-disciplinary issue at this point, I think) but it does encourage me to keep a bit of security on my journal. And anyway, if it had..well, who is going to tell me to my face that the reason they aren’t hiring me is because they don’t want a queer activist/critic of psychiatry/youth rights activist/whatever it is that stressed them out on their team? OTOH, maybe it’s a good seive, too, as I don’t know that I’d want to work with someone who coudln’t cope with having someone like me on their team anyway.
It also encouraged me to delete my last journal in it’s entirety (somehow some entries suddenly gained text involving use of an illegal drug I have never used, saying that I had. Attempts to edit or delete those entries hit technical problems across several different computers and internet access setups. Since they were marked public and I did not want a potential employer [nor my parents, since I do know they stalk me via the internet] believing I used said drug, I deleted it. If I weren’t so worried about the employment implications I might have just added a reply to each explaining the problem)