With or Without Diaeresis?

I've got allot of emails in my student mailbox which, even though I've read them, are marked as "unread". One of those is a mail of Mr. Hans Coppens in which he asks us to search ourselves via Google and to tell him in a blog post what we think of the results. This is done best in a private window or logged out from every possible website, if not you'll get pretty biased results. I decided to open a private window, because I'm logged in into way too many - I'm talking about possible dozens - websites. Then there was only one question to be answered: Should I give the "i" in my last name a diaeresis or not? I realized that I didn't use one on some website because it wasn't possible to have one. An example of this is the Japanology lab, where I use "Nesrine Naimane" as my username, without the diaeresis on the "i", so I searched myself with and without diaeresis.

Google found 17,800 results in 0.74 seconds (pretty impressive, huh?) concerning "Nesrine Naimane", but only four or five actually matter. The first link is to my Twitter account, NSFrenchFries, where you can read, like and retweet my - for now - 7.059 tweets. On my Twitter account my birthday, 668 pictures and videos, which are often linked to my YouTube channel, and a link to this blog can be found. With this information you'll easily know a bit more about Nesrine Naimane without diaeresis. Link nr. 2 is to a post from the Sint-Joseph Institute, my secondary school, about the "Groot Bokrijks Dictee" (Eng. Grand Bokrijk Dictation, can be compared with a written spelling bee), which is held annually with obligatory participation. I won with solely five flaws, but I remember that some other co-winners and I weren't quite allowed to be proud of it. The former directrix thought that because of our ethnicity we had to study harder to learn the Dutch spelling and that's the reason why we scored excellently on the "Groot Bokrijks Dictee". I still don't know whether this was supposed to be a compliment or the opposite of one. You can read more about my secondary school on LinkedIn, where I'm on the second place (what? No gold?) of the list of top twelve - top eleven according the Google link - profiles for Naimane, right under the Canadian Naima Naimane of which I don't know if she's family.  I must admit that I'm not really proud of the last result because it's proof of a 9-year-old me who wants to tell everybody the following: "i like chiro!!!!!" (yes, with five exclamation marks and chiro, is something like scouting).

Google found a lot less results for "Nesrine Naïmane": 660 results in 0,51 seconds (quite illogical, isn't it). This results are spread over thirteen pages (or O's), of which eight are spent to Style Saint Society, a social media site with fashion as its focus. When I just started blogging I received an invitation to try this site out, but I didn't use it anymore afterwards. The remaining three pages concern nine other results, but two of them are dead links. That's because I deleted those two accounts, Pinterest and Chictopia, since I didn't use them anymore and didn't know why I should keep them around. Yet again Twitter stands at the top of the results page, followed by Google+ which I only have an account on because I use YouTube, which is a result as well, and Gmail (like many other Google+ users). The third result is Facebook, but again this isn't a real result since the link leads to a page saying there aren't any users with the name Nesrine Naïmane. This - apparently inexistent on Facebook - Nesrine Naïmane is also very active on the wiki of Japanese History, where she's done some WikiGardening (time to go back to first person singular, because this is getting creepy). The digital place where I'm active most is Instagram where I post daily or try to. Almost every picture in the image results for Nesrine Naïmane is on Instagram.

Luckily we've got the freedom to post whatever we want on the internet, and I like to use that freedom. But sometimes you've gotta think at least twice before you post something, because some things we'll be on there forever (see: "i like the chiro!!!!!"). Even though I wanted to take that statement down a couple of years ago, I'd rather have it not removed because I'm not ashamed anymore for the 9-yearold me. I know you can hide some results from Google, but this doesn't mean they'll be deleted. You know, a stitch in time saves nine.