Thursday, September 23, 2004

Good thing he didn't choose "Den Besties"

Kevin Drum has a proposal for devising a measurable unit for Internet Fame: the "Brooksie", which is defined as the number of one's own Google hits divided by the number of Google hits for New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks.

So, working it all out for me, here are the results for various search terms:

"Byzantium's Shores": 15,700 hits.

"Byzantium Shores": 16,500 hits. Lots of people leave off the possessive suffix on "Byzantium" when referring to me. (No, this doesn't bug me one whit; I've just noticed it off and on.) Since I assume that this result also includes the 15,700 hits for "Byzantium's Shores", I'll just call this 800 total unique hits.

"Jaquandor": 1,690 hits.

My real name: 102 hits. (Look it up yourself.) I expect that since I've pretty much abandoned my strict pseudonymity, this number will gradually go up.

Total: 18,292 hits, for a Brooksie value (using Kevin's result for a Brooksie value of 1.00 as being 127,000 hits) of .144. So I'm not very well-known, apparently.

Ah, but wait! It seems to me that since we're talking Internet fame, and not just Blogistan fame, I should also include my figures from my years of Usenet activity. Searching Google Groups, I come up with an extra 12,080 hits for "Jaquandor" and for my real name, thus bumping my total hits to 30,372, for a final Brooksie value of .239.

Pagh. I'm still "small potatoes".

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