I guess all authors who know about it, subscribe to google alerts. You enter your name or the subject you are interested in and once a day Google will tell you if they have found anything new that has been posted about you.

Ping! I got one this lunchtime. Except it’s not about me. It’s incredibly flattering that people are putting up profiles of me, but they all come from one posting that I can’t change and as these profiles disseminate through the web, feeding off each other, they get it a little bit more wrong on each new site.

They insist on calling me the children’s author, Hugh Rayner. I haven’t been Hugh since I was three months old. My name got so confusing, I changed it by deed poll over 20 years ago. No one knows who Hugh Rayner is!

Also, the profile, which has been gleaned from various sites, is of a person I vaguely was and the work I did about ten years ago.

I guess this is going on all around the world about all sorts of people. Computers putting together profiles about people they know nothing about. Or am I being a bit self-obsessive?