Not me, the other Joe White #Life

I'm stunned.

I'll start from the beginning. Somebody named Ooogabooga sent me a weird e-mail message a few hours ago. It said, and I quote:

Your performance at the Kirksville K-Life House blew completely, nerd.

I didn't know what a Kirksville K-Life House was, so I googled and dug a bit. What I found is that K-Life Ministries is a Christian youth ministry organization; that they have a chapter in Kirksville, MO; and that yesterday (Saturday) night, that chapter had an event called "PURE EXCITEMENT", led by somebody named Joe White.

I actually know who this other Joe White is, in a vague way. Several years ago, I briefly joined a Baptist men's group (obviously this was before I discovered the Unitarians), and one night they showed a video of a Promise Keepers event, where this Joe White character was speaking. I watched the video, and then forgot about him for a while.

Much later, I started blogging, and after a while of that, I started to get curious about my blog's Google rank. And found that I had to go through many pages of this other Joe White before getting to me. (Actually, we were both pretty buried by some country singer named Tony Joe White.)

The guy I saw on the Promise Keepers video a few years ago is the same guy who ran the K-Life session last night. So. Mystery solved: mistaken identity. Ooogabooga went looking for this other Joe White, stumbled onto me instead, and called the wrong guy a nerd.

I almost left it there. But then a little thought wandered into my head. And that little thought was, "I wonder why he found my Web site instead of this other guy's."

And on a whim, I did a new Google search on my name; something I haven't done in a couple of months. And this is where the stunned part comes in.

I'm a guy with a blog. I don't run my own business. I've never spoken at a conference. I've written two novels, neither published, both still in rough draft form.

This other Joe White runs a set of Christian summer camps that draw 20,000 kids every year. He spoke in front of 10,000 people at a Promise Keepers convention last year. He's published 13 books.

On a Google search for our name, he first shows up at result #10.

My blog is result #2.

Wow.