Sean Reiser

On a few occasions I've blogged about the reactions in twitter to things in the outside world such as the election, President Obama's Speeches and technical outages on services like gmail. In the course of this I quote a few random tweets that illustrate what's going on. Of course I only use public tweets and credit the tweet with the tweeter's name.

Today I received an email from someone who's trying to remove all instances of himself from the internet. He's gone as far as to delete his twitter account and blog and now seems to be writing all the google hits on his name and asking folks to remove any references to him As I have blogged his tweet he's come asking me to remove the attribution (not the tweet itself) from my blog. The funny part about this is that his tweet wasn't at all incredulous or embarrassing, I think it was right on target.

The funny part to me is that someone believes that they can genie back in the bottle. After a few minutes of googling, this person seems to have been active on the net for at least 5 years... there are many references to his blogs, tweets and photos. Even if he speaks to the hundreds of places where he's referenced and they all agree to take down the reference to his handle (something I doubt), that's not everything. We live in an age of cacheing, sites like archive.org are backing up the web for posterity. Not to sound crass, but people need to realize that once they say something on the web, it's there forever, something to think about.