Am I Really Me?
Welcome to Insanely Interested, the blog about looking at the world through curious and creative eyes that can't settle for just one interest. Check out our about page for more information! We hope you find this blog interesting and thought-provoking. Enjoy!
Today, I decided to check my Google Analytics statistics. You know how it’s always interesting to see where visitors come from, which posts they read, how long they stay. That usual stuff.
I followed the cues and went to take a look at a referring site that had sent a bunch of users my way. I wasn’t expecting what I saw:
The article was written by me. But I had no memory of me writing this post. I hadn’t even been to the site before. Maybe this was just a coincidence: after all, I’m not the only Jarkko Laine out there.
Not a coincidence this time. This was something else. I skimmed through the article and at the end of the post, I saw my own face staring back at me!
This was a creepy moment.
I sent a note to the site owner. He took me seriously and promised that the post will be deleted soon.
It turns out that someone had contacted him pretending to be me to get a freelance writing gig on that site. I can’t blame the editor for accepting the offer (in a strange way, I’m proud that my portfolio worked that well).
Here’s the e-mail message I never wrote:
I’m Jarkko Laine, a web developer, freelance writer, and creative designer. I spend every minute of my spare time developing WordPress themes/plugins, developing attractive and usable websites, along with writing articles and/or tutorials.
I stumbled upon [name of the site] quite some time ago and would love the opportunity to write for your site.
With the following sites you can get acquainted with a few articles I’ve written, so that you can get a better feel of what I love to do:
Net.Tuts.Plus Author/Jarkko Laine
My contributions to Ruby on Rails
I appreciate the time you’ve taken out of your busy schedule to read this email, I will gladly await your response.
Thank you-
Jarkko Laine
Insanely Interested
Not quite the message I would have sent, but still, this guy got most of his facts right: I did write those tutorials and you are reading Insanely Interested right now. The contributions to Ruby on Rails were not mine, but done by another guy with whom I have the honor of sharing my name, Jarkko Laine from Tampere, Finland.
How do you know that I am who I say I am?
I can’t understand know why this person decided that the best way for him to get started in the world of freelance writing was by pretending to be me. I have a feeling that this story isn’t finished yet, but there are some interesting questions that I want to discuss with you already.
I want to ask you two questions:
- How can we know people who contact us really are who they claim to be?
- How can we make sure people don’t misuse our names and hard-earned personal brands?
I trust people. And believing that you are you is the most fundamental part of that trust. Unless someone tells me he is George Clooney, I have never seen any reason to doubt it. Until now, that is.
If you try to make yourself more interesting by pretending to be someone else, shouldn’t you pick the identity of someone interesting?
What do you think? Can we still trust each other? If we need proof, what could it be? How can we keep people from using our identities for their own purposes?
This was the first time I experienced the dark side of building your personal brand first hand, and I’m still processing it, so I don’t have big ideas to share. Instead, I’m curious to hear if you, as fellow bloggers and social media users, have experienced something similar, and what kind of thoughts you have on the topic.
Should we turn to technology and create a new kind of email? Would that solve anything? Should we doubt everyone?
Or maybe we should still just trust people.
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Nice article.
Creeps me out, the fake-jarkko had sure read his homeworks about You. Still it’s weird to pick a “random” name from internet to write an quite long article on a website.
Like i said. It creeps me out.
Interesting incident. I think it’s rather unusual to steal someone’s name. Usually one tends to steal the text and use their own name to publish it, but this is something totally different. Actually, if the article written by the identity thief had been well made, it could have been even a good thing for your image. So strangely enough, you could even see the whole thing positively.
On the other hand though, as misunderstandings tend to happen easily, it was probably a good move to expose the truth. You never know what will happen to a lie that survives too long.
Very interesting indeed! Agree with Jetro, concentrate in the fact that the other you brought you some traffic. Maybe he wanted to imitate you and start build his (or her) writer career on the brand level you have reached instead of starting from ground. You are not the first one having a ghost writer, this one only forgot to ask your permission and instructions. Not nice, I guess. BTW did you ask whether the site owner would like the real Jarkko Laine writing on his/her site?