On 5/28/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Out of curiosity, doesn't being a freelancer mean your reputation is quite important to your income? Wouldn't you be hurt if "Eric Moeller is a child molester" was the first thing that came up on Google under your name?
It certainly helps that my name has an umlaut which Google cannot deal with very well, so it treats a few variants (such as Erik Møller or Erik Moller) as equivalent. The only case that has ever led to a misunderstanding were some comments in my homepage guestbook (which I since deleted), which I had left unattended for a while. It was taken over by two strange subcultures, satanists and religious fundamentalists, who decided that my personal guestbook was the best place to wage the great war between these uncompromising ideologies. One of them even ended up posting under my name (the guestbook didn't have any authentication).
Of course, there's the occasional case where someone contacts me only to be never heard from again, and I sometimes wonder if they decided to google me. ;-)
Erik