The persistence of words and the power of search engines

Jon Carroll's excellent column from today's San Francisco Chronicle points out that in the world in which we now live, even your most monumental blunders are easily and trivially preserved. He mentions a word coined in the past year, Googleschaden. Here's his definition: "Googleschaden refers to the feeling you experience when you google people and find, deep within their pronouncements and predictions, blunders of monumental proportions." It is, of course, based on the fine word we have from German, schadenfreude, which essentially means taking pleasure in the misfortune of others. The modern twist is that with a search engine, it's not difficult to uncover a web page, even an obscure one, where facts and words are posted. This is worth remembering as you write about your day in a blog or personal site. Here's an article from the NY Times showing how online words can affect your business life in unintended ways. Remember, there are even web sites dedicated to preserving pages no longer available on the web, so posting and deleting may not be good enough.