Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Am I the real Brian O'Donovan or BOD?

If I ever travel to the Boston area, I am regularly asked "are you the Brian O'Donovan?". While I am tempted to answer yes, it seems that the questioner is normally thinking about the host of the Celtic Sojourn program on WGBH. In Ireland, the name Brian O'Donovan is actually quite common and if you search Facebook, you will find several hundred people with this name. However, when Irish people hear the name they will most often think of the news reader on TV3 with that name.

Part of my reason for writing this blog is to raise my profile on-line and occasionally I do a Google search on my name to see what the results will be. Before I started writing this blog, most of the top search results for the term "Brian O'Donovan" would relate to the radio presenter from Boston. However, I was delighted to see that when I now do this search (with Google Personalisation turned off), 6 of the top 10 results relate to me, 3 relate to my namesake in Boston and only one relates to the newsreader on TV3. So I suppose I can now confidently say "yes I am the real Brian O'Donovan"

The title of this blog is "Brian O'Donovan (aka BOD)" in order to clarify which Brian O'Donovan is responsible. In school I was known by the nickname BOD (based upon my initials). However, in recent times people have started using this same nickname for Brian O'Driscoll, the current captain of the Irish rugby team. So when I recently saw the headline in several papers "BOD invited to royal wedding", I was relieved to find I wouldn't need to splash out for a new suit. When I do a Google search for BOD I find no references to either me or the rugby player. There is quite a diverse set of links returned although the most popular understanding of the term seems to be "Biochemical Oxygen Demand".

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