Ryan Trembath (dot) Information

Yesterday, a friend and I were doing some basic searches to see if his name came up online. Having deleted his myspace profile weeks ago, nothing should come up right?

WRONG!

Check out this little scraper site operating under the guise of a Myspace search engine. Looks like they’re scraping profile information and (for your added benefit!) putting their own Yahoo! and Kontera ads on the page.

There is nice little disclaimer noting that:

All profiles and associated pictures are copyright their respective authors. MySpaceProfiles.org is not affiliated or associated with MySpace.com in any way.

Does that carry any weight? I’m not a lawyer.

I did find, via the remove my profile link, that you can paste this code:

META NAME=”MYSPACEPROFILESBOT” CONTENT=”NOINDEX”

into your profile so that their robot won’t index your page. This will also (apparently) delete any existing profile on your id. But what if I already deleted my profile?

There is a form where you can enter your id and request it removed, which I have done for my friend. I will keep you posted on whether or not it’s actually removed.

Managing your image just got tougher.

This falls inline with Lisa Barone’s post yesterday. Lisa made all of her personal facebook information private and still ended up in the search results. Turns out that her friends don’t keep the same privacy settings she does.

Where’s my publicist!?

Big companies spend time and money managing their online appearance and now you will have to as well. It’s already a well documented fact that most employers will do the Google, Facebook, Myspace search on you. This wonderous two point oh world of search, social and advanced scraping has the potential to be a headache for us all.

Are you prepared?

Ever since Winnipeg’s Millennium Library opened they have advertised that free wi-fi was coming to the building. Well, it’s finally here and through an exclusive deal with MTS Allstream it costs $3.00 an hour.

Hold up. That’s not a public service. Rogers and Telus already provide internet/fee service in the area. The marketed benefit of using MTS is “a portion of the revenues back to the City of Winnipeg to support ongoing technology needs and the purchase of library materials”

We’ve officially leapfrogged back into the future.

I had half of a post written about this “leaked” Google video for the new guys, then I found this post that covered all my points and more. If you’re a Google Fanboi I suggest you read it.

If not, I’ll give you this to think on. Apparently Google reader is storing 10 terabytes of information from over 8 million feeds. Does big brother’s name start with a G?