What's the best way to control what people find about me on the Internet?

I'm particularly interested in controlling the top hits when someone searches my name in Google or other major search engines. I am a writer, and I intermittently publish online. Unfortunately, some of the work that I did 5-6 years ago is still the top hit on Google--since it's at a high-traffic site--while my recent work is much farther down the list. Some of the intervening hits are random, backwater pages for, say, theater companies I worked for years ago...stuff like that. It seems ridiculous that they're so high on the list, but it would be a lot of legwork to contact the relevant webmasters and ask them (at risk of sounding rude) to remove my name.

I understand that you can *pay* Google to give a certain site as top hit when a certain search is done, but I'm looking for a free way to manipulate results. I've tried asking webmasters who link to my older stuff to update/erase their links or references to my name, but they're usually to busy or unfriendly to bother.

If I open a myspace account under my name, and then use that page to link to the sites I want people to see, will that affect Google results? Or does Google not do crawls of personal myspace pages?

Any other suggestions for manipulating search-engine queries for my name? I'd rather not have to design and build a whole website along the lines of "myname.com" but maybe that's necessary...

Thanks for any suggestions!