and today we have...
This is just a quickie…and something you can do at home as they used to say on Blue Peter – if you’ve ever posted pictures on a blog post or on a forum or anywhere on the net. Google the name of your blog or your own name or however you appear on the net and select the images option. See how connected we all are – it’s mind boggling! I see the gravatars of my friends, the pictures of their breads, and all sorts of connections I had forgotten, and some mysterious people who I don’t know at all of course. Today there was a picture of a zeb-ra! Do it again a week later and marvel at how it changes, a kaleidoscope of images, of bowls, and vegetables, of dough and cake, and fruit and leaves, there’s a rabbit, a dog in reindeer ears, there’s a New York chef, and today knitted socks – such fun!
Hours of fun!
Have you found anything that surprises you when you google?
Zeb Bakes 
I recognise that photograph of a wensleydale muffin, Joanna. XX
It’s the apparent randomness of the images that is intriguing. Anyone know how it works? It’s a very lovely muffin Gill :)
Thats funny, all my bloggy activity in pictures.
Joanna, that sourdough photo under flickr is looking mighty good. Beautiful crumb.
Brydie it’s funny and also a bit scary….It makes you think doesn’t it? I’ve been emailed by a couple of people who feel uneasy about this and I totally understand where they’re coming from. The lawless unlimitedness of the internet has its good and bad points….
Mostly all I google are recipes. I do some research, but the idea of googling an individual is not really comfortable to me. My sons keep showing me where I show up in a googling effort and – well, yes, uncomfortable would be the word for how it makes me feel.
Then again, I just started using the internet 3 years ago and very tentatively at first.
But, I like seeing what you found.:)
I understand completely what you mean Heidi. I am wondering now whether I should really have posted this, but the pictures above came from googling ‘Zeb Bakes’, not from any other source. The images from other blogs and websites I presume occur because they are linked in some way to something the other person has written about me and put a link back to my blog, or something like that. The zebra appeared because the zebra image was named zeb-ra. I think…. So if you put pictures on your blog of you and your family say and named the pictures by their names, and then someone else wrote a post saying I love the photos x, y and z and put links to them then the chances are those photos would appear if someone googled your blog name. On the other hand it may be something to do with how many visitors the other blogs get to start with, I like to think it’s chaotic and a bit random and then I worry less. I don’t put lots of ‘private photos’ on the net, because I now take the view that anything I write or upload is in most ways out of my control the moment I put it there.
I suspect if you write a blog and put no links in it, very little will be thrown up by the search process. The connections are like neurons firing in some algorithmic synapse somewhere in the ‘brain’ of the net, the ones that get reinforced get stronger, the ones that don’t, become less pronounced and fade away. If anyone who understands this reads this, it would be interesting to hear if my theory is remotely right!