This all got me thinking of my web identity - the face I show to the web, which in this day and age is the only world that matters. I am lucky enough to have a rare name, rare enough that I am pretty sure me and my cose-related family (8 people) are the only bearer of this family name. So when you search my name on Google, all the results are actually related to me, myself and I.

However, when looking at these results, the top ones are my profiles at various websites such as LinkedIn or Flickr. Although these are mine and I define what is written there, I do not have 100% dictator-like control over them. This bothers me a little...

So I started working on my webpresence portal, a website that defines me and should eventually become the nº1 search result for my name. It will be the website I write on my business card, and although it currently only shows links to stuff I do, I have plans to expand it with new functionalities: a portfolio and make it an OpenID provider for starters.

Update: Google now offers 10.000 sets of business cards to their Google Profile users.

They are kinda lame and cool at the same time. Anyways, they do no ship to Japan so I won't get one. My design is better.

This weekend I saw on TV another of those websites that you know everyone will talk about. Its name is 住所パワー which aims at calculating your "Address Power" from the number and proximity of restaurants, schools, train stations, etc.

My address, even though I live out in the relative boondocks, 20 minutes from 池袋 - the closest station on the Yamanote line - into 埼玉県, scored a nice 3,321 points and is ranked A-class.

Here are the results by criterion, with the number of shop and the distance to the closest one (I added the translations). I probably owe my good score to being extremely close to the station and across the street from a supermarket on one side and a mall on the other.

Note that the number of Love Hotels and 風俗 - basically any kind of shop/bar/club/salon related to the sex industry - comes as a criterion, although they probably need a broader databases because there are at least 2 dozen hostess bars/キャバクラ in a 200m circle around my place that should have gotten me a lot more points...

I'll use that to post all the one-liner updates that I never bother to post here for fear of breaking my pretty blogging structure. It's also usable via my keitai so I can post on the go.

You can see my twitter profile and add me if you'd like. If you plan on signing up, be careful, I can see it becoming really addictive.