Stop Google-stalking and deal with your Cyberchondria!

The Internet has given life to many new gadgets and habits, which inevitably leads to a quirky range of modern addictions and maladies. The British weekly New Scientist lists these:

• Ego-surfing: When you frequently check your name and reputation on the internet.
• Blog streaking: "Revealing secrets or personal information online which for everybody's sake would be best kept private."
• Crackberry: "The curse of the modern executive: not being able to stop checking your BlackBerry, even at your grandmother's funeral." (
• Google-stalking: Defined as "snooping online on old friends, colleagues or first dates".
• Cyberchondria: "A headache and a particular rash at the same time? Extensive online research tells you it must be cancer."
• Photolurking: Flicking through a photo album of someone you've never met.
• Wikipediholism: Excess devotion to contributing to the online collaborative encyclopaedia, Wikipedia. (Wikipedia even has a page where you can test whether you're an addict: Test).
• Cheesepodding: Downloading of a song "so cheesy that you could cover it in plastic wrap and sell it at the deli counter." Cheesepodders are especially vulnerable to soft-rock favourites from the 1970s.