Your name on the net

Once upon a time, finding someone with the same name as you was a pleasant novelty. Today, the internet has transformed every one of your namesakes into a potential enemy, reports Ryan Dilley.

A drunken bet about the existence of a namesake managing an obscure Scottish football team took comedian Dave Gorman on a worldwide search for 54 other men who share his moniker.

"I am Dave Gorman ... aren't I?"

The hunt provided Gorman with enough comic material for an acclaimed stage show - not to mention a BBC TV series - but the quest came at a price. He says his sense of identity has been "diluted".

"Before I did this, the words 'Dave Gorman' used to define me. Now they don't."

While Gorman used some resolutely old school methods to contact his namesakes - even buying a full set of UK telephone directories - the internet has put many users on a virtual collision course with those boasting the same handle.

By any other name

Try applying for an e-mail account with one of the large ISPs or free providers, such as Hotmail or Yahoo, and you'll soon find out how many other users share your name.

"So David Jones has gone and so has David Bowie. I'll take ziggy05 then"

With millions of people vying for screen names at these popular sites, it's a case of the early adopter catches the worm. Everyone else has to settle for adding numbers or punctuation in their quest to find a unique address that resembles their name.

And it isn't just a problem for the UK's 15,761 men called David Jones or the 7,640 Margaret Smiths or even the 2,000-odd Mohammed Khans and all their counterparts across the world wide web.

Lawyer Tracey Kerr had never come across anyone sharing her name, until she tried to set up a Microsoft Hotmail account that is.

'I am not a number'

"Tracey Kerr had gone. They offered me 'traceykerr05', but I thought: 'No! I'm not going to be number five!'"

Ms Kerr decided to apply for an account under her old nickname, Top Cat. "They didn't even have that. There were already 500 Top Cats."

Nick Imrie, from Domainnames.com, says users stand a better chance of securing the name they want by registering a URL.

"Anyone else want to try registering www.gladiatoronline.net?"

Though the coveted ".com" suffixes are getting snapped up at a rate of knots, there are more than 300 country and other codes to choose from.

"People do feel some frustration when they find their family name is not available, but there are ways to work around it. You can shorten the name or append it, perhaps with something like 'Smithonline'."

Of course, an adult would come to terms with sharing their name with a virtual stranger and settle for a modified URL or a second level domain name.

Where egos glare

But such rational thinking often goes out the window if you are indulging in the ultimate act of net narcissism, ego-surfing.

Putting your own name into a search engine is such a common pursuit the phrase "ego-surfing" has passed into the Oxford English Dictionary.

"Billie Clinton, an 18-year-old cheerleader from Texas? Hmmmm"

There are even sites, such as Egosurf.com, which have been specially designed to help in the hunt for those virtual references to your good self.

When those results are returned, finding out that someone else is doing more to promote your good name than you are can be galling.

Ryan Dilley, you may have been appointed deputy head boy of your Leicester sixth form college (when I wasn't even allowed to be a milk monitor at school), but I own ryandilley.com. Checkmate, I think.