So perhaps if you ventured into my little corner of the Internet (and you actually know me) you’re wondering why I would go and do something as vain and cliché as create a website for myself (with my name as the url no less). To which I would say that it’s no more vain and cliché than buying anything produced by Apple and parading it around with a sense of entitlement and superiority – but I digress. Truth be told, this website is my attempt at reestablishing my presence on the Internet. While I was in college one of my CIS classes required that you create a website for yourself which was then hosted on the school’s webserver dedicated to student pages. The great thing about this was that for some reason Google indexed these student pages the way an ivy-league grad student is recruited – highly. So, with almost no effort or cost my school webpage became the #1 search result for Pete Austin which of course made me “the most important Pete Austin in the world”. This was great because apparently there’s a video game developer in Britain named Pete Austin who gets a fair amount of industry press coverage and usually ranks higher than me. So ranking higher than someone who is actually recognized in the media for his work gave me a strange sense of accomplishment and self-importance.
Before you judge me for that, Google yourself and then tell me that it isn’t infuriating to see Google claim that all the other people with your exact same name are somehow more relevant to the world than you yourself. Yeah, I thought so. Which brings me back to my own motives. Upon graduating from college I was surprised to find that my student webpage was not automatically removed from their servers, but rather it remained online and ranked just as highly in most search engines. Unfortunately, in 2007 and after five years of free web-hosting on my alma-mater’s dime they completely overhauled the student pages webserver and simultaneously purged all non-current students’ pages.
The other thing that a blog grants me is time saved from trying to manage my profile and communications accross the different social networking sites, (Facebook, MySpace, & LinkedIn) thus the tagline. It’s sort of fun to try and track down old high school or college friends to try and digitally renew your friendship. But let’s face it you never really talk to them and about two weeks later the novelty has worn off. I’m done with social networking sites.
So here I am, back online again on my own terms. I guess maturity has stripped me of my desire to be “the most important Pete Austin in the world” but if you’re curious to read about what’s going on in my head and life – here you go.