Speak of the devil
Fri 24 Feb 2006, 1:51 pm
“Speak of the devil and he is bound to appear” has been running through my mind lately. Now that everyone who would like to be anyone on the web has ego feeds set up through Technorati, PubSub, IceRocket, etc., it seems that all one needs to do is name that person and link to him or her to conjure them up–if not in the flesh, than at least in the comments.
For example, as much as I’d love to think Roy Tennant and Lorcan Dempsey are feverishly refreshing See Also to be the first to read my new posts, in reality they ended up commenting on this post because I named them and linked to them. Same with LibraryThing‘s Tim Spalding today.
It makes sense. I had a “false hit” in my ego feed today: a Christian blogger named Doug McHone linked to See Also under my name in a post on his blog Coffee Swirls. The problem is, he thinks I am a Baptist minister (he would be so disappointed to know that I am an atheist librarian). I left him a comment on his web form to let him know he had the wrong guy.
It’s also funny that anyone could comment on this blog with a fake name and email address. If it sounds enough like the person in question to be plausible, I’d never think twice that it could be an impostor.
Anyway, I thought I’d play Doctor Faustus and see if I can summon any more famous (or famous to librarians) people to the comments. I have already named Tennant and Dempsey so let’s call:
Or, more ambitiously:
Ah, hell, let’s go for broke:
Tags:
egofeeds, conjuring, doctorfaustus, fridayafternoonsilliness,
- License:
- File under: Navel gazing
- Comments? 12
You’re not a Baptist minister? Then how can you expect to be Roy Tennant when you grow up?
I used to wonder what I’d be when I grew up, but I came to suspect that would never happen…
Sorry I’m not one of your seven conjurees. (Now there’s a word you don’t use everyday…)
Comment by walt — February 24, 2006 @ 5:40 pm
Maybe I could convert to Hinduism and hope to be reincarnated as Roy? I’m a little unclear on how this works. Maybe I should just grow a moustache.
And Walt, you would have been one of my seven deadly conjurees had you not commented on the previous post, tipping your hand as an at least occassional reader. (W00t!)
Comment by Steve Lawson — February 24, 2006 @ 7:27 pm
Nancy Pearl! Callimachus!
I had the same experience with mentioning Perl-author Larry Wall. Every time I’d mention his name he’d pop up. Kinda like Nyarlathotep. But much nicer.
PS: I don’t ego-feed, really. Just “LibraryThing” and its variants.
Comment by Tim Spalding — February 24, 2006 @ 8:19 pm
Yeah, Tim; for better or for worse, only the URL-based ego feeds work for me unless I want to read what’s going on with that bass player. And I don’t even want to talk about the half hour or so I had an ego feed for “See Also.”
Comment by Steve Lawson — February 24, 2006 @ 9:33 pm
Steve, Sloppy wording in my comment: I’m not sorry that I didn’t make your list (you put together a great list!), I’m sorry that the first comment on your post wasn’t from one of the seven. Nothing occasional about my reading, thanks to some newfangled thing called, um, Bloglines, is it?
Comment by walt — February 25, 2006 @ 10:14 am
I’m just glad you guys showed up! I guess I’m not much of a Dr. Faustus…
Comment by Steve Lawson — February 25, 2006 @ 2:45 pm
Red rover, red rover, send Steve on over! :)
I’ve been offline for a couple of months, but when I am reading my aggregator, you are so way in there, Steve!
Comment by Jenny Levine — February 26, 2006 @ 10:12 am
Hmmmm… hmmmmmm… because she appeared, does this make Jenny the Devil?
Comment by K.G. Schneider — February 26, 2006 @ 1:43 pm
Thanks, Jenny. We have missed you while you have been offline. And Karen, don’t sound so surprised.
There have been so many comments on this blog lately, which is really great. I just changed the template for the right rail so that some of the most recent comments blog-wide are now listed at the top of every page. I’m considering a comments feed for the blog, but I don’t really like any of the usual options (separate feed or in the main feed both seem to have problems for the reader in my experience).
Lastly, this comment marks the point where the number of entries and the number of comments pull even, which is a milestone of some kind (though about half of those comments are from me). It’s 98 comments and 98 entries, which means I’m coming up on another little milestone…
Comment by Steve Lawson — February 26, 2006 @ 4:17 pm
More seriously .. as I note at http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000937.html watchlists are actually quite useful as a ‘smart’ layer over brute aggregation. I spend quite a bit less time now looking at individual feeds than I used to.
Having a name which is not commonly held is also useful ;-)
Comment by Lorcan — February 27, 2006 @ 6:15 pm
what’s going on over here? I just woke up. I think Gorman may be the toughest one to summon in this way because while the rest of us have blogs [with trackbacks and comments and technorati links embedded into our wordpress builds, if you're me. this isn't ego surfing as much as it's just keeping up with the churn.] he’s not really 1) blogging and 2) concerned with being part of the social network of online library folks, or any folk as near as I can tell.
Also agreeing with Loran, there’s only one other really prevalent Jessamyn blogger — Jessamyn North, no I am not kidding — so it’s nice to be able to do a first-name search and know that your hits are pretty accurately about you. Now if I could only get that “other” Jessamyn West to stop showing up when I egoi-surf on Amazon.com….
Comment by jessamyn — March 5, 2006 @ 9:33 am
Yeah, the Gorman thing was silliness. Part of my effort to keep things cute around here.
I agree that “ego feeds” sound narcissistic, but I don’t really think they are (no more narcissistic than self-publishing my thoughts in a blog already is, I mean). If people are linking to you and talking about what you write, it makes sense to employ these virtual “clipping services” to keep on top of it all.
Comment by Steve Lawson — March 5, 2006 @ 9:54 am