Digital Footprint of an Author

Doing an Internet search on yourself may sound like the ultimate in "mirror-kissing narcissism" at first glance to borrow an expression from www.flickr.com about someone's Siamese cat. However, you may be pleasantly surprised where your published articles have gone, due to sharing between corporate partners and creative commons copyrights. You don’t have to do much if any coaxing for this to happen. Our audience could go from a United States website to an international site or visa-versa. To do the search, put your entire name within in quotes "Joffre (J.D.) Meyer," then put your shortened name within quotes: "J.D. Meyer," and in my case and many others, your email/Internet alias as well--"bohemiotx." Check a variety of search engines, such as yahoo, google, ixquick, and bing to name a few.

Once upon a time, I decided to send three modules to Connexions of Rice University http://cnx.org. (1) Applying Psychological Type Theory to Writing, (2) Subject-Verb Agreement, and (3) Questions and Answers for The Atlanta Exposition Address by Booker T. Washington. First, all three went to Scientific Commons in Switzerland, normally a German-language site http://en.scientificcommons.org/joffre_meyer Then all of the articles went back to Houston to a lens by Houston Community College http://cnx.org/lenses/cnxhcc/affiliation/lens_view/psychology?&view_mode=detail The trip across Houston involved a little coaxing by me but not the automatic transport to Switzerland. Many months later, I did a google search of myself: "joffre jd meyer," and I turned up 14,000 entries--including a new place for these three articles: www.libsearch.com/contributor/95723 Libsearch.com is a "federated search engine harvesting 146 digital libraries and institutional repositories, adding up to nearly 2 million documents as of early May 2012.

Spicy food, especially hot sauce, really excites me. So I wrote a short article for Associated Content, now a part of Yahoo http://voices.yahoo.com Hu Fong Sriracha Hot Sauce—a Thai hot sauce by a Vietnamese manufacturer who moved to California. This article ended up at http://nvids.info/tag/sriracha with eight other articles, mainly by chefs—together with sites dedicated to helping one buy the squirt-bottle legend online.

It was quite thrilling to find a Spanish lesson of mine, "Six Spanish Language Song Lyrics for Improving Listening Comprehension," travel from www.lessonplanspage.com to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. http://www.library.ubc.ca/edlib/lessonplans/sec/modlang.html This ten-page lesson covers lyrics from beginner to advanced in their ability to be deciphered by the second language learner and song listener, together with several genres of music: tejano, norteno, duranguense, metalero, and hybrids--including rap.

Here's another Spanish lesson. It started at my original website that McGraw-Hill sent to me--their pageout program http://jdmeyer.pageout.net {Now it's the academic half is best found at http://tinyurl.com/4yp8j4w due to problems with cover page}. First I wrote a preface to my Spanish Tutorial section, "Spanish Tutorial at Northeast Texas Virtual Library." It gives highlights to that whole section and links to some of the best sites. Then I sent that preface as an article to Associated Content. https://www.associatedcontent.com/article/5545538/spanish_tutorial_at_northeast_texas.html?cat=4 First, I learned that ForeignLanguageClass got the article http://foreignlanguageclass.org/?p=182 and they put it at least four different locations on their site. Then at least one other website found it. http://homebrewing.burgher.org/2011/05/30/best-language-to-learn/

My most popular article at Associated Content was "Jabon Cacahuananche: Mexican Soap for Oily Hair Control." Originally, it was one of my earliest chapter sections for my ongoing Developmental English/Writing textbook project--a short, narrative essay in my Intro to Writing chapter. This article, like the Sriracha Hot Sauce article, ended up at a commercial site http://www.getshampoo.com/dir/shampoo_for_oily_hair/dp.php?r=237

A Sunday School program for my ex-church on the 40-year interfaith relationship between the Unitarian-Universalist Association (UUA) and the Rissho Kosei-kyo (RKK)--a brand of Japanese Lotus Sutra Buddhism--got published at Oh My News of South Korea. Later it was blogged by the UUA national magazine http://blogs.uuworld.org/media/page/9/ in the Interfaith communities section. Former UUA president John Buehrens called Nikkyo Niwano, the founder of the RKK, “the most important interreligious partner the Unitarian Universalist movement has ever had.” (OhmyNews International – 11.2.09)"

One of my crusades is writing and emailing info about the University of Texas at Austin's Intellectual Entrepreneurship (IE) program. Last summer, I wrote an article for a local online journal, observing that IE could be the answer for the Industry Growth initiative (IGI) Strategy One: Generate more money from higher education. http://tyler.thedailyyou.com/news/2010/jun/15/intellectual-entrepreneurship-university-texas/ First this article was picked up at the home base of IE itself https://webspace.utexas.edu/cherwitz/www/ie/ie_meyer.html Then the article traveled from Austin to Toronto and the Creative Class website www.creativeclass.com in the Education department of the Library http://www.creativeclass.com/rfcgdb/articles/Intellectual%20Entrepreneurship%20at%20The%20University%20of%20Texas.pdf.

Thus I had the rare joy of my top two education heroes: Richard Florida (Toronto) and Richard Cherwitz (Austin) stick my little article for Tyler in their libraries! If I hadn't done an Internet search this time, I could have spent time moaning that my article on IE was the most unpopular of my twelve for the local site.

Anyway, I've made my point. It's good to find out where your audience is-- a statement that would have sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. At times, you may want to send articles or books to places where you're already somewhat known.