I was going to write something about a guy I heard saying something surprising on the radio this morning. Unfortunately, what I heard him saying was surprising because I’d have expected him to avoid saying things like that for fear of his life or at least for his job. It’s quite likely that the local maniacs in his neck of the woods have an internet connection but no access to British radio. Even if they can get British radio (maybe using their internet connection) blogs are more googlable than radio shows.
I’m aware that worrying about this may suggest delusions of grandeur on my part. I’m envisaging someone googling the guy and the subject, finding my blog, getting outraged and causing him trouble. Then I feel bad and his job passes to someone worse. The maniacs win. But is this really a live possibility?
I don’t think I am deluded, for two reasons. One is that if I don’t write about it it’s unlikely that anyone else will. I did the google search I was worried about and there wouldn’t be much else in the way, so if maniacs did these searches they’d be quite likely to find my blog. If I don't write about it then it's very unlikely his comment will get back to them. The other reason is that it’s always possible my blog will get famous and then years later this guy’s throwaway comment will be used as a pretext to cause him trouble. To paraphrase Noel Gallagher, if you don’t want your blog to be bigger than Phil McNulty’s it’s just a hobby. Though I suppose this is just a hobby. I don’t know. I just don’t want to cause this guy any trouble. He sounded awesome.
Well the obvious way to find out the googlability of this issue is to write a post with the guy's name and some of the other key words (not keywords, though these should be used as well to as closely as possible mimic a "real" post, because google reads them) and an appropriate title, just change the incriminating word to one of similar commonality (frequentness of use on the internet) and then see if this is then googlable. The drawback is that it would mean you'd have to either make a test-post on your blog, which wouldn't be ideal, or you'd have to cleverly construct a post that did say something interesting at the same time as acting as a template to test googlability. That could be quite fun though.
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