Hands in the cement

It's amazing, this tool we call social networking. You can use it find information about just about anyone.

Give me a person, any person, and I bet you I'll find them on Facebook, MySpace, Google, or somewhere on the 'net unless they are a hopeless shut in.

It's such a great tool for journalists. Because unless you're marooned on an island in the middle of the Pacific, there's some imprint of you on the series of tubes, and it's just a matter of finding it.

I do find it amusing that, when you Google my name, nothing from the Spartan Daily comes up until the second page. This makes me look like a hopeless nerd, because the top find is my old author profile from when I did bad strategy articles about Magic: the Gathering for Pojo.com.

The Heretic's Sermon for the win, folks.

I started taking names and e-mails and plugging things into these publicly available resources just to prove a point. Everyone posting on this article that is criticizing the Spartan Daily on this article is a member of San Jose State's Greek system, because they weren't smart enough to mask it with a different e-mail address.

There are many others I've done this with, some I prefer not to mention because it is internship sensitive.

In short, everyone is on the Web. We all have taken our hands and pressed them into the cement somewhere. Part of the job of a journalist, nowadays, is to find where that may be.