I have a Google Alert set for my own name (there, I said it) which usually just provides a daily summary of eBay links to my books. Until yesterday:
http://www.saint-tropezimmobilier.com/news/Ben-Jeapes.html
“They’re talking about me in St Tropez?” I thought. Strangely … no.
What you get is page with the opening blurb from my Wikipedia page (yup, got one of those too) followed by a lot of guff about finding property in St Tropez. You can see from the URL that this is a specific web page named after me. So, someone – or more accurately, I suspect, something – has created it.
I would guess, without too much thought, that a hapless webbot roams Wikipedia, picking out the entries of individual people and creating a St Tropez page for them. At least, that was initial theory. However, that would suggest there must be a lot of them and when I did a web search based on this hunch I could only find one other Wikipedia entry that has had the same treatment:
http://saint-tropezimmobilier.com/news/Simon-Templar.html
Yes indeed, if my theory is true then the two people with Wikipedia entries judged most worthy of this treatment by our friend the webbot are Ben Jeapes and the Saint. To be quite honest, the bot may be out of a job soon.
Alternatively, I suppose it could be the work of a fan with similar taste to mine: I mean, I’m a fan of Ben Jeapes and Simon Templar, so why shouldn’t someone else be? The test of this theory will be whether pages like this appear dedicated to C.S. Lewis, Arthur C. Clarke, Miles Vorkosigan, Terry Pratchett, the Doctor, Rumpole …
I hope it’s the George Sanders Saint because he was the best.