Leaving traces for Internet archeologists to find when they look back from the future

I've been thinking a lot about entertainment lately, what it is, how people think about it and experience it.  I was talking with a friend from India recently about how entertaining it is to look back at school yearbooks and how reminiscing about our hair, our clothes, our friends and reading what people write on the pages is always good for laughs among friends and family.   He wasn't familiar with the term yearbook but once I had explained he told me to check out www.Allofme.com; Allofme is a web service that finds references to you on the Internet and maps these references to a time-line.  

I did check it out and it was fun and entertaining but more than that.         

I did a search on myself and found the several the other Cynthia DuVals right there intermingled with me in time.  I found out I'm mentioned in at least two books I didn't know about, kinda nice.  I was a little embarassed by a few references the service found, OK, maybe more than a little embarassed.  Thankfully it didn't pick up some of the junk that I know litters the Internet with my name on it, tests I've done on emerging software, profiles I've written to get past marketing gatekeepers, an Office Live website test for example.  Pure junk.   Allofme didn't make me laugh much but it was fun to play with and it did tell me that there is a lot of work with my name on it that isn't junk, could be on-line and probably should be.     

This is a great little tool and a lot of fun but not in the intimate yearbook kind of way that makes it fun to look at with friends and family.  You get some embarrassment and some surprises and insights about how the universe of people now and in the future can see you through the lens of the Internet.  I certainly have new ideas about how I can proactively alter my on-line identity to suit my purposes better than on line mentions in books and random attempts to blog and build webpages.  I'm going to get to work on these traces of me because it might be that these traces are all that will be findable about my life when I'm gone; forget dust to dust I'm going to be random bits of data.  My great grand children will find me scattered across the Internet by Googling "Cynthia DuVal."  It's my job to make sure they find me.