Finding Myself

When Microsoft’s new Windows Live search went, well, live recently, i decided to try it out just to see how its results differ from the Big Search Gorilla. The tried and true way to do this is, of course, to egosurf and google yourself.

But first, a brief history. Over the years, the Boisen name has not exactly been a household word. Other than an obscure horticulturalist who couldn’t get his new berry to thrive and spelled his name funny, there just aren’t that many Boisens out there. (Happily, John Knott was able to rescue his work, and wound up with a successful amusement park as a reward) Growing up, i only heard of a few others Boisens who weren’t relatives, and it wasn’t until our daughter Claire went to college that i actually met a non-related Boisen in person, another girl in her freshman class (one of those statistical anomalies that seem like they should never happen but actually happen all the time). By the time i was Net-savvy enough to want boisen.com, though, i discovered some namesake had gotten there first: wouldn’t you know it!

I’ve been on the web for a while now, presented a few papers and such, and of course have this blog thingy, so i’ve got my small share of Google’s index (though my Googlemass is still exceeded by my brother the big shot musician, who is so cool he even has a Myspace page). “Boisen” being of Scandinavian origin (our branch of the family came through the Schleswig-Holstein area of Germany), and “Sean” being from Ireland (a place my mother loves), i’ve always assumed the chances of finding somebody who shared both my first and last names were close to zero. Imagine my surprise, then, when live.com returned another Sean Boisen!

Unfortunately, i can’t quite figure out who my web namesake is, since all the information about him appears to be in Danish. A colleague tried an online Danish-to-English translator — a rather rare service itself — and we guessed from the resulting word salad that he manages real estate (i’d really be in trouble if he were a computer scientist!). So at least our resulting web presences aren’t likely to overlap much. Just checking today, he’s lately wrangled his way into the first 30 Google results for our name: he didn’t used to be there at all. And he’s #4 in the results on live.com: harrumph!

This all became even more interesting when i looked at the site howmanyofme.com. An initial slashdotting brought it down, but it’s back up now, and you can look up how many other people in the US share your first and last names. The funny part is when i look up myself:

HowManyOfMe.com
Logo There are:
0
people with my name
in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

I knew my name was rare, but i never realized it was so rare that i don’t even exist!

Upcoming Talk at SBL Meeting, and Slidy

There have been quite a few silent weeks at Blogos, not because i have nothing to say, but because things have been busy with some new developments i can’t quite bring out in the open yet. But i want to remind anybody who will be at the Society for Biblical Literature meeting in DC next weekend that i’ll be giving a talk, “Weaving the New Testament into the Semantic Web”. The talk is in group S21-6, at 11AM on Tuesday the 21st: i’ll post the location once i know what it is. This appears to be the last session of the conference, so it may get a little lonely: come and keep me company 🙂

In preparation, i’m plowing through to the next release of New Testament Names, which i hope to put out prior to the talk. This will be the first release with a full set of instance data for people: it will also include geographic data for numerous locations, more detailed documentation and best practices, and several new properties, so i’m excited about it. But there’s no shortcut yet (though i hope this will provide one for those who come after!): it just takes a long time to create this data.

At the same time, i’ve decided to bite the bullet and use Slidy for the presentation. I was frustrated last year that i couldn’t make my presentation a first-class citizen of the web. Like Jon Udell says,

“… sharing a few well-chosen words and pictures with audiences, both during a presentation on a projection screen and afterward on the Web, should require nothing more than the tools and techniques the Web natively affords.”

One of the most appealing aspects of Slidy to me is making the contents of presentations directly addressable: rather than “go here, download the PowerPoint presentation, and check out the great graphic of this on slide 6”, i can just put in a link, or at least i could if last year’s talk were in Slidy (not yet). This is all part of the microformat revolution of unlocking data from the myriad little caves it currently hides in: that’s a main theme of my talk, so it only makes sense to exemplify it with the presentation itself.

I’ll post a follow-up when the slides are available (hopefully before midnight Sunday!).