I google myself. It's a 100% fear-based reflex. Some other news outlet - probably CNN - ran video last year on college students' use of sites like RateMyProfessors.com, and I was appalled at what I saw when I poked around on that website. Students were rating and commenting on their professors like they weren't real people, like they were YouTube videos or Digg posts. A lot of the comments were either salacious ("I highly recommend this sexy beast of a man") or disrespectful and dismissive ("A complete tool. Like a demented big bird babbling and babbling about nothing.")
I haven't shown up on RateMyProfessors.com yet, but last year, some students from the middle school I taught at made a MySpace group about my co-teachers and I where they blasted some of us and lauded others. The Latin/Spanish teacher got the brunt of their adolescent angst. She came up again and again on their "Worst Teacher" discussion board and was livid about its existence. There were a few posts about me, mostly positive, but still, it freaked me out to suddenly have Eternal Web Content about me floating around in the ether. Knowing that it was all authored by vengeful 13- to 15-year-olds was no big help.
So now I google myself. So far, so good: there's just my LinkedIn profile, a few comments I've posted on other people's blogs, and a woefully incomplete profile that ZoomInfo put together by trolling my church's website. Oh, and there's my "FBI" mugshot; at least they got the hair right. Since I know I'm currently in the clear, I'm tempted to throw a wrench in the system by creating my OWN profile and then commenting the bejeezus out of it. Here's what I'm thinking I'll post about myself:
*I never got tired of coming to class, especially knowing that any day could be Jello Shots Day.
*Her use of shadow puppets helped me to understand difficult grammatical concepts almost instantaneously.
*The third nipple became less distracting as the semester went on.
*Her PowerPoint presentations healed me of congenital athlete's foot.
*She's a hard grader, but she's a champ in the field of mud wrestling.
*Some say she is The Highlander.
*She would be a better professor if she could get her Vicodin addiction under control.