Hello, my name is Richard and I am an ego surfer. The habit began

about five years ago, and now I need help. Like most journalists, I can’t

deny that one of my private joys are seeing my byline in print. Now the 【M1】_________

Internet is allowing me to feed this vanity to ever greater extent, and the 【M2】_________

occasional sneaky web search has grown into a full-blown obsession for 【M3】_________

how high my articles appear in Google’s ranking where I put my name 【M4】_________

into the search box. When I lastly looked, my best effort was a rather 【M5】_________

humiliating 47th place. You know you have a problem how you find 【M6】_________

yourself competing for ranking with a retired basketball player from the

1970s.

Not that I’m lonely for suffering from a dysfunctional techno-habit. 【M7】_________

New technologies have revealed a whole raft of hitherto unsuspected

personality problems: think crackberry, power-pointlessness or

cheesepodding. Most of us are familiar in sending an e-mail to a 【M8】_________

colleague sitting a couple of feet away instead talking to them. Some go 【M9】_________

onto the web to snoop old friends, colleagues or even first dates. More 【M10】________

of us than ever reveal highly personal information on blogs or My Space

entries. A few will even use Internet anonymity to fool others into

believing they are someone else altogether. So are these web syndromes

and technological tics new versions of old afflictions, or are we

developing fresh mind bugs?

【M2】