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Monday, August 29, 2005

God bless the Internet

In last Friday's post, I asked friends and strangers in the blogospehere to help me locate a man named Jeff Shaffer. He wrote a fantastic article in the Christian Science Monitor about wearing nametags.

I immediately received several letters from people who'd searched for his information on InfoSpace.com, Linkdin, Catbird Press, Google and the like. But because it was the weekend, I figured I'd wait till Monday to verify the information.

THEN...exactly 55 hours and 42 minutes later, I received an email from Jeff Shaffer himself! He was actually Googling his recent column and came across my blog post!

Oh, the irony.

Jeff and I marveled about the ease with which we found each other on the web. (As it turns out, the information people sent me was for a different Jeff Shaffer.) But then again, it's really not that surprising how easy it was...

Let me take you back to December 31st, 2002 when HELLO, my name is Scott was officially released. As many of you know, The Portland Tribune ran an article about it, which hit a news wire, led to an explosion of publicity and ultimately birthed my career as an author, speaker and publisher.

But what you may NOT know is that the day that article came out, I received a late night phone call from a strange man who ended up stalking me for about two months. He called me daily, left creepy messages on my answering machine and even showed up at the furniture store where I worked!

All because he got my cell phone number from my website.

Damn. Maybe I was too approachable.

LET ME ASK YA THIS...

Has the web decreased our anonymity?

* * * *
Scott Ginsberg
Author/Speaker/That guy with the nametag
www.hellomynameisscott.com

3 Comments

3 Comments:

At 2:53 PM, Dutch said...: Scott,
Nope. The web has not changed that. We are still fairly anonymous until someone enters our name in search engine. Or blogs about us.

What the web has done is make us a little more approachable. Emailing someone is less threatening than walking up to them at a book signing or, heaven-forbid, at the introvert's nightmare, a schmoozing type event.

Great Optimism,
At 12:01 AM, steven edward streight said...: Yes, it is harder to be anonymous, the web has definitely changed this.

I can type in names of extremely obscure musicians, composers (like Daphne Oram, or Oskar Sala), and find heretofore unfindable information.

Companies do searches on employee names to learn more about them, what they've posted to the web, and what others have said about them.

Identity Theft is another example of how non-anonymous we've become.

Trick from Vaspers the Grate:

use blog comment posting as Super Email.

By posting a comment at the blog of a person you want to contact, they are more likely to read it.

But an email could get filtered out by spam filters or the person's unfamiliarity with your name and email address.

I see you're using the Word Verification anti-spambot device, captcha.

Be sure to tell other Blogger bloggers about it, when you visit blogs and post comments.

BLOG DAY 2005

Aug. 31

we are supposed to do a post recommending 5 new blogs to our readers.

I displayed your blog in my list.

See my post of today, Scott at VTG.
At 6:01 PM, palegreenhorse said...: i don't think so. point one: name duplication and screen names keep all information on a person on the web somewhat confusing, as you saw. point two: you probably know someone like my mother-in-law. she knows all kinds of people and can trace it back to who knows where and tell you all about someone you have never met but somehow you know them. at least that is how it seems. she is a walking web of connections about people. those people keep others from really being anonymous with our without the web.
point three: we like to think we know other people. we are social creatures and so even the introverts among us (myself included) seek out some social connections either through the web or not.

i think the web makes us better connections since we can be more picky about our contacts without being rude.