Fighting Amongst the Jims
Everybody at some point will google their own name. Some people (like those with their own websites) will do it more often to see if people can find them… Now admittedly, what are the odds that if you’re a freelance artist for hire, and somebody is looking for a freelance artist, they’re looking for a freelance artist named Jim Tierney? Or James Tierney, or J. Tierney? I know, but regardless, when you first design a website to showcase your skills like I did a couple years ago, you like see it pop up in a search engine, even if you may have to be slightly more specific than the average person in need of a service. Now imagine your surprise when you do the aforementioned search, and your name and profession pop up, but the website is not your own.
That’s right… I went looking for myself and instead found someone el…. You get the idea…
Anyways, blah blah blah, The fact is… There are other Jim Tierneys out there, and they’re doing stuff! What the heck is going on? I can’t remember what the exact search term was, art, artist, illustrator or something, but I searched for it, expecting to find myself, but instead… I found him.
Needless to say, after I quit making highlander jokes, I had to get used to the fact that there’s another guy out there with the same name as me, doing very similar things to what I’m doing. I got used to it… but what if there are others? (I mean besides Jim Tierney of Digital Anarchy.) What if there are a bunch of Jim Tierneys out there? What if what I once thought of as my innate talent was really only a fluke caused by some sort of weird cosmic resonance based on a specific combination of letters?
Just to play it safe, I better find the best Jim Tierneys out there so we can gather together and form an army… to suppress the rest of the Jim Tierneys… cause I know for a fact that a bunch of them are gonna be real jerks.
June 22nd, 2007 at 4:00 pm
JT, perhaps a name change is in order. I feel fortunate that my only real name competition on google comes from some French guy who played a tv newscaster in The Da Vinci Code. It seems that you would stand out more in the search going with James, two other artists named Jim Tierney on the first page just won’t do.
June 22nd, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Oh, a name change… Not a bad strategy… It’s far more legal than some others I was considering…
Although, I thought maybe I could set Thom to working on something that would let me assimilate them in borg-like fashion.