the Sam Jackson College Experience

I was recently having a little debate with Diana over at the Digital Natives blog about how best to manage online identities as a teenager, inspired by Lifehacker’s recent post about managing digital reputations. My main point of agreement was about ‘becoming the source’ for information about yourself, and how important it is to maintain a high-profile place for positive information control. I do that very well with this website–google ’sam jackson’ and you’ll see I’m the fourth result–but right before I saw Diana’s post, I had decided I wanted to cover some other bases.

It’s midterms time here at Yale, and while some people like to go out and shop or buy things to de-stress some, I opted for another route: buying a few domain names. I went to gratuitous lengths to try to acquire a few I’ve been negotiating over for ages, with continued failure. But I did go ahead and buy www.SamuelAJackson.com and www.SamuelABJackson.com. I remain bitter that I don’t have the funds to acquire samjackson.com, or samueljackson.com, etc.

I wish I had been a little older–or a lot wiser–when I was younger, because I would be a lot richer now for my domain purchases if that had been the case. But, in case anyone is ever searching for my full name, I now have some good insurance. These wouldn’t really rank, of course, and I will just have them redirect back here for now. Still–pays to try to cover as many angles as possible, and it’s really pretty cheap. Certainly a much lower down payment now than there will be later, if you have to try to buy a domain off someone or do damage control from high-ranking bad PR.

For a good place to start investigating how to control your public identity online, check out both that lifehacker post and danah boyd’s musings on the subject last fall.

Today, December 21st, is Samuel L Jackson’s birthday! I actually got to chat with him on his website today and wish him a happy birthday, stop by over the weekend to try to do the same! I only got in touch with him briefly, but I’ve always been a huge fan of The Man, not just because of our shared name. It was always frustrating to hear people tell me I should either have / change my middle name to be “L-something” so I could be like him, but I always appreciated the positive correlations that were made between the two of us.

I also always wondered if, now that a search for “Sam Jackson” has me as the 4th Google result,  if he ever happened upon my site? Or maybe his manager got angry that I was taking away search listings? I’m not sure–in any case, I always wanted a chance to chat with him and hopefully will be able to catch him properly sometime over this weekend. He has always seemed to be a really cool guy and if this is any indication, he’s really nice to his fans, too–spending a bunch of time on and off on his birthday to talk to them!

Sidenote: being heavily inundated with Samuel Adams commercials as a child, growing up in the greater Boston area, I always always always wanted to start a brewery and make Samuel Jackson’s with Samuel L as my spokesperson, long before Dave Chappelle did his sketch about the subject.

Anyway… I am done with finals and will be heading home tomorrow. Happy birthday to Samuel L Jackson, happy vacation to me!