Of crawlers and blogs

Back when Hector was a pup* and I was a young newspaper reporter, brand name companies such as Coca-Cola, Sanka, Caterpillar, and a few others employed staffs to peruse newspapers and magazines and to listen to radio and television for misuse of their trademarked names.

Ordering a cup of Sanka or having a coke (with a lower case "c") often would get the offending writer a nice letter from the trademark owner suggesting that a repeat offense would have both parties meeting at the bar . . . of justice.

I suspect there are many fewer people doing that these days when so much information is exchanged via the Internet.

Now, instead of people perusing paper, applications - crawlers - search the WorldWide Web for key words. With most printed publications now having an on-line, digital version, the companies in most cases can save their subscription costs. What's in US News & World Report? Let the crawler read the pages and if there is a hit - if it finds a key word - it will report back.

Crawlers look at more than newspapers and magazines. They apparently look at personal blogs, too.

This blog was hit by a corporate crawler looking for specific key words appearing in a previous posting.

I don't mind. I don't write anything libelous or scandalous; most of what is on this site is about as exciting as dry cereal left soaking too long in milk. But I was surprised to see two hits within minutes of each other from the same corporate source. Since this is a new blog and since it hosts a potpourri of subjects, it's not likely that my visitor knew about this blog before the crawler discovered a key word. Since only one blog entry was "hit," the finger points back to a single source.

Technology. Interesting tools; tools to find things and tools to record visits by the search tools.

But it's a reminder. The Internet is an open book; everything out "there" is open to the world. When blogging, or emailing, or otherwise putting it all on the line for the world to see whether you want it seem or not, consider the Pilot's Poem (Burma Shave would be proud):

When descending

from above

Be like porcupines

making love

C A R E F U L L Y

* By the way, if you're interested in learning about Hector, try http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-sin1.htm - and no, I'm not THAT old.

Yohanon
Yohanon.Glenn @ gmail.com