In a Wiki

Yesterday morning I woke up and discovered I was a Wikipedia entry. (That line feels vaguely reminiscent of the opening of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which goes something like this: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” And perhaps my initial reaction was not much different from Gregor’s.)

I have no idea how it got there—it looks like some web indexing. (I swear it wasn’t me!). But it picked up some general biographical data that was mostly accurate, some business background and even family info. I did fix the birth date, which was off by a year.

Once I recovered from the surprise, I began to diagnose this phenomenon. Have I become more important? Well, no. In fact, since leaving ClearPlay I’ve become less relevant in the world of business (CEO’s trump consultants any day). What then? And it came to me. Web 2.0 is not-so-gradually making us all public figures. Our privacy is ebbing away. The time is not far distant when virtually every public action that you take will be traceable, creating a vast library of online biographies free and open to the viewing public.

The Libertarian in me says take it down. But the devil known as Vanity says leave it up. In this case, I’ll neither stand on principle nor bend to temptation. But I will leave it up. With my new business, I could use the publicity.