Oh beware, little bloggers, what you write

So this is actually pretty cool. I'm at Access 2007 in Victoria live blogging the event on the Conference Reports blog. Thursday morning, about 8:30 PST, Jessamyn West gives the opening keynote. Somewhat later, Amanda Etches-Johnson from McMaster U gives a talk on the Endeca overlay on their catalog. Well, this morning, I notice that Jessamyn had read what I had written about her talk and commented on it, so I replied to that, and she added another comment, despite the fact she's already left, I believe. I'd like to think that she has all of our feeds in her feedreader and stays on top of them every day, but I highly doubt that. More likely, she has an alert service set up somewhere hip that lets her know when new uses of her name appear on random blogs. Pretty cool, though.

So later today, I'm sitting there live blogging a talk when Donna writes to me and asks me to please tell her that the person from McMaster I harangued (I asked a funny question of Ms. Etches-Johnson--well, funny to me and Jessamyn, at least) was not Amanda E-J, when, of course it was. Donna pointed out to me that Amanda E-J had been kind enough to use our blogs as an example in something she wrote, so I should really be nice to her. Well, I was nice, and I don't think she's too annoyed by my ranting question of yesterday.

So, while I'm sitting there reading this email from Donna today, Amanda, a propos of nothing, picks up her laptop, wheels it around in my direction, shows me our conference reports blog on the screen, and asks if that is ours. Why, yes, I said, why? (Thinking, oh crap, did I say something mean there about her talk--really, I didn't.) Well, someone from Endeca's Canada office had seen it (within mere hours of its publication, mind you) and written to her, asking to have a conversation about some of her ideas in the post. He was a bit confused about the fact that some guy named Dale from Kansas was writing about her talk, adding a few of his own editorial asides, not that Amanda was writing the post, but we both found it funny that he reacted to it. Again, he probably has some alert that trolls for his company's name and found my little post.

There's a point to this story: people read and process our blogs in ways we cannot control and do not intend. Far from being a cautionary tale, I want to do a little dance because of this. We're seeing what we said was the point behind blogging. Put information out there, and let people do with it what they will. Thanks to this little bizarre set of events I've related, I met new people, caught the interest of Endeca with my comments (who knows what fruits can grow from such little seeds), and learned that Jessamyn--smart person that she is--cares about how and when her name is invoked. This is great stuff.

Comments

[jessamyn]

Yay!

[amanda]

fanTAStic stuff :)

And, for the record, I really appreciated your comment after my talk and totally grokked the spirit in which it was intended. But, thanks to Donna for having my back ;)