We're all creepers sometimes--I'm definitely guilty as charged.

After Googling myself, one page came up that was actually me. It was the second page (surprisingly) where it was me, listing me as photographer for the Cactus Yearbook. When I type in "Brandi McCormick texas" that same result comes up on page one. Needless to say, a lot of results came up that weren't me, obviously. I have to say that I am all for free and public information available online. Our society has been headed in that direction for a while now, and I don't see it stopping anytime soon. That being said, I wanted to say a few random things:

1) Last year, one of my friends from high school turned me on to whitepages.com. If you haven't used it and are feeling in the mood to be uber-creepy, check it out. I was able to find the home phone numbers and addresses of lots of people I know, with directions to their house, alternative phone numbers, and sometimes email addresses. Even creepier, lots of times it will list all of the residents of that household or who are in some way related to that family/household. To embarrass myself for the sake of the class, I will tell you this: After reading up on bios and personal information of a favorite famous actor of mine, I knew what his hometown was and that his dad was a doctor. With this information, I was able to go to whitepages.com, and find his parents house, address and phone numbers, by means of deduction. Now I have that so I can send them my screenplay in hopes of giving it to said famous actor in hopes of him reading it and me subsequently becoming famous. All thanks to the convenience and big-brotherism of Google search!

2) "it's looking a lot more like an all-things-to-everyone portal and less like simply the world's best search engine"...yes yes yes! This pretty much sums up my thoughts about how Google will eventually just take over the world: search, Google docs, the G1 phone, etc.

3) I have never Googled anyone I was interested in, dating, or anything. Although I guess I can see where it might feel like you are protecting yourself by checking up on them, I think it's a little too hardcore for my liking to do my own personal background check of someone on Google, when I probably don't know enough about that person to weed out the real information about them with the irrelevant information.