Becky Hogge admits that, in her head, she is the Paris Hilton of the internet

"No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library." One imagines Samuel Johnson might have revised his opinion, were he around today. Perhaps, like me, he would have been sucked into that most elating of time-wasting pursuits, self-googling. With each new tool for internet search and retrieval he, too, might have found canny new ways to exploit it in order to augur his online status.

For me, it started with Google. Thanks to the unusual spelling of my surname, it was small shakes coming top in a search for "Becky Hogge", even if I dropped the quotation marks. As my online portfolio grew, "Hogge" quickly followed. Then, early last year, I discovered that if you typed "Becky" into a "return sites from the UK only" constrained search, I came number three, behind a transvestite living in King's Lynn and a waterfall in Newton Abbot. This, in my estimation, made me the most popular natural-born female Becky in Britain. Friends were less impressed, but I carried on regardless.

Then there followed Technorati, the search engine devoted to that bastion of online vanity publishing, the blog. Then del.icio.us, the bookmark-sharing site, where I could judge the character of those who bookmarked my work to read later by the other links they'd stored. To my ego's great surprise, I still don't have a Wikipedia entry. But I have my own tag on the photo-sharing website Flickr, together with 17 photos submitted by other people. In my head, I am the Paris Hilton of the internet, no matter that millions of others have achieved just the same feats.

Vanity drives the internet. Perhaps not the kind of borderline narcissism described in the paragraphs above, but vanity none the less. Observing the behaviour of the volunteer coders who created the Linux operating system in the early 1990s, Eric S Raymond wrote in The Cathedral and the Bazaar that it was the recognition of their peers that drove them to devote so much of their time to writing code they would give away for free.

The same goes today for Wikipedians labouring over articles (even when, as Johnson observed "to make dictionaries is dull work"), bloggers chasing news stories, and kids breaking new bands on MySpace. On the web, as the corruption of the old Andy Warhol saying goes, one is guaranteed to be "famous for fifteen people". There are other factors, of course - the joy of achieving a shared goal, the thrill in the immediacy of it all - but just as for other areas of human endeavour, the ego is central.

With the web, the ego gets precise feedback. Even when a contribution to the online world is relatively small, there will be some echo in another part of the network that will spur on its creator. Although we may all act for selfish reasons, the collective results of our indulgences can be staggeringly beautiful, or practical, or both.

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