Hmmmm.
I thought this wasn't supposed to happen, but I "googled" myself today and a recent poem & other posts came right up.
The entire "Lullaby Lost" thread, and Lo's thread about the lost kitten (where I'd made a crit/entry) came up, and some other stuff.

I thought items posted here were not supposed to turn up on the worldwide web like that.

Are they ?????????????????????????????




[This message has been edited by Wendy Sloan (edited July 29, 2008).]

Wendy, they do! There's a Chinese Janet Kenny in Singapore and an American Janet Kenny who always has these words at the top in capital letters:

Poop Stuck to Cat's Butt.

We are but molecules in the great machine.
Janet

Wow! Life in a fishbowl!!!!!

^ ^ ^

Would you call that "blank verse" Stephen?

No, Shaun, just an experiment. Wait and see.

Look at Stephen's post in Edit mode. I believe he's reminding us about a coding suggestion he made some months back. I recall there was some controversy over whether it would work, as it's designed to work in headings, not in the body of the post.

If you want to be even more rattled about what shows up, try the newest search engine, cuil.com. It's still giving somewhat uneven results, but I found to my distress, when I (vainly and egotistically) googled myself, that it brings up material from threads pruned months or years ago.

There are organizations devoted to archiving the Web, and they do it, unfortunately, even to material we specifically do not want archived.

Out of curiosity I Googled my name to see if I could find any pirated poems. I didn't find any of those but found one I didn't know had been published (it was a respectable journal so I don't think it was snatched). Either they did not notify me or I accidentally erased it. I'll post it on Accomplished Members.

dwl

I'm pretty googlable, but as an experiment I just started typing first lines into google search. No author. Shit, my poems are everywhere. There are services I've never heard of who must scan and archive the literary quarterlies, the little mags, then of course there are the zines, Alan's seablogger.com. Reviews, essays, personal blogs by people I've never heard of. I picked ten first lines at random and found every one. Every poem correctly transcribed, whew. Is there a way to get paid for this, he asked plaintively.

Then I googled Timothy Murphy poem. In the first ten pages of citations in this specific search there was only one mention of the Sphere. So if there's Sphere stuff it's buried deeper than anyone would ever go. I did learn that there is an unfriendly Wikipedia article with a deliberate falsehood.

[This message has been edited by Tim Murphy (edited July 29, 2008).]

I found out through a search engine several years back about some of my poems being published which I'd never been notified about. It was a strange experience because there was also a discussion about those poems on-line that I didn't know about!

I think it is safe to say that if you don't want to own something, don't post it anywhere, ever. It seems someone is keeping an eternal data base of our every keystroke.

Anne