Todd Stadler's blog

Please don't sock-puppet on my pathetic blog

If you read my blog a lot, then you know how few people read my blog a lot.

No doubt you've tried to drop references to it in conversation ("You know, like Todd mentioned on Cockahoop last week?"), only to have people stare blankly at you, sniff derisively, or mention how that URL is blocked for some reason at their office.

But the point is that this blog, it's not so popular. Which makes it all the more goofy that anyone would bother writing fake comments in an attempt to generate fake commenter consensus. Especially on an old entry. Let me explain.

Over two years ago, I wrote an entry, the sole point of which was to show off the ridiculous amount of time I spent turning a photo of Astros players celebrating into an animated GIF featuring a prancing Luke Scott (who then played for the Astros). Such was my free time in 2005.

As might be expected, it generated all of three comments in the month after I posted it. Which, relative to the usual reader feedback on my blog, was something of a comment brouhaha.

Eighteen months passed without any further comments.

And then, in April of 2007, along came one "haley kettler", who decided that what the world most needed to know was that "man luke you are so hot. i love you!!"

Now, if you are familiar with my blog, then you know two things. First, that my blog is not popular. But we already covered that. And second, that, as unpopular as it is, it seems to attract a certain class of person who is either too ignorant or too lazy to discover that the Google search result for the name they typed in does not, in fact, lead them to a page written by that person, but merely to a page mentioning that person.

I speak, of course, of Raven Symone and her Web-illiterate fans who so commandeered an otherwise unrelated blog entry that I was forced to alter my blog code so I could disable further comments.

I bring all this up for several reasons. One is that I want to remind you that I still appear on the first page of Google results for [Raven Symone phone number], though my efforts to curtail discussion on that entry have forced her fans to misdirect their energies elsewhere, thereby decreasing my Google relevance.

The other reason I bring this up is that it would seem that Haley Kettler (if that is her real name), like the Raven-bots before her, was searching for something related to a famous person (in this case, one Luke Scott) and posted a comment on one of the many random results that Google provided her.

It being her prerogative to display such charming naivete for all the Web to see, I welcome such behavior, or at least tolerate it. At least one could say that she was brief in her actions — something that could not be said of my own Web-wide embarrassment (that is, this blog, which, have I mentioned, is not popular in spite of your reading it).

Anyhow, nearly a year passed with no reactions to Haley's professed love for Luke.

Then, somebody calling herself "llola" Googled for [Haley Kettler] and found the aforementioned blog entry with Haley's comment in it as the first result. I know this because the Internet told me, and the Internet knows all things. And because I have Google Analytics installed on my blog. Creepy? Perhaps, but such are our modern times. Google knows. Ahem.

Curiously, though "llola" was searching for pages related to Haley Kettler, she then made the same mistake that Haley did upon finding my blog. To wit, she imagined that she was communicating directly with Mr. Scott, as opposed to leaving a comment on some random (did I mention unpopular?) blog.

"hunter pence is sexier than you no doubt about it and looks better in the astros uniform than you did that is why you got traded," she said. And while I will leave the merits of Mr. Pence's relative lust-engendering qualities vis-a-vis Mr. Scott undebated, I will note that "llola" submitted her comment with an email address that strongly suggests her name is S. Kettler. Perhaps an inability to discern the authorship of a Web page runs in the Kettler family.

But, as they say, that's not all. S. Kettler waited all of two minutes after her first post before pretending to be someone else and seconding her own comment. (How do I know it's the same person? They used the same IP address and posted within two minutes of each other on an otherwise sparsely viewed entry. Please.)

Posting as "beavis", Ms. Kettler wrote that "i think that girl llola is right ............. haha what you gotta say bout that"

Here's what I gotta say bout that: please don't sock-puppet on my pathetic blog. Thanks.

Social networking: is it actually social?

Julia and I attended Ignite Portland 2 last week. Ignite is a recurring event that, while seemingly marketed to a fairly elite tech crowd, nonetheless aims to be a community-building exercise centered around people sharing their passions (in five minutes or less). With time built in for social networking.

And I'm all for that. It wasn't even a year ago that I felt all alone in my corner of the Portland tech world. After all, I'm the lone Web guy for a publisher with 30 employees — about the only person in my company with a strong interest in the Internet qua Internet (occasionally I'll try to talk shop with our IT contractor, but he only comes in once a week). I'm largely self-trained, and I've never been much of a networker, so I didn't know anybody else out there doing what I was doing, caring about what I cared about.

Sure, I'd worked at Intel as a hardware designer for several years, but somehow that didn't count. For one thing, hardware designers inhabit a rather different world from the people-centered world of the Internet ("User interface? Here's your user interface: 0101010010010110!"). Furthermore, I was notably bereft of contacts within the world of Web movers — whenever someone asked if I wanted to do a freelance job and I declined, I had nobody to recommend as an alternative.

About the only things that passed for community were a handful of choice RSS feeds dealing with Web topics and whatever resources that day's Google searches revealed. (This is where your heart breaks.)

And then, somehow, I found myself discovering Portland's nascent online tech community.

I believe it all started with Twitter. Somehow I heard about it and, like most people, decided it was stupid. Then I tried it anyhow, and got hooked enough that just typing the word in this blog entry reminded me to start up my Twitter client.

Anyhow, I started by following my friends on Twitter. And then, for kicks, followed the people they made references to. And the people they referenced, and so on. Oddly, this didn't lead so much to an ever-expanding circle of friends of friends of friends, but rather a fairly tight-knit, self-referencing circle of what seemed to be key players in the Portland tech scene (and by "tech", I probably mean "Web", because like I mentioned before, hardware doesn't count, and the only software that counts these days seems to be Web software).

Anyhow, within a few weeks, I was listening in on the conversations of people who work for companies that are all about the Internet — not merely tech-savvy people like myself(?), but people who lived this stuff.

But as if it weren't enough to eavesdrop on people's voluntary offerings on what they're doing at any given minute, the tech community announced it was throwing a get-together. Actually, it announced tons of them at various levels, but one in particular seemed to consume all the oxygen, since it wasn't focused so much on technology as social activity. That was the first Ignite Portland.

I had a great time at that first one, and the most recent one as well. But as usual, ten paragraphs in, here is where I get to my point: it's one thing to "talk" to people online, and quite another to talk to them in person.

This all became clear to me at Ignite Portland, where I found I recognized several people just from their icons on Twitter. "Hey, I know that person!"

Of course, the first sign that I didn't really know that person was that I wasn't sure what her real name was. I remember telling my wife (who attended Ignite 2 with me, though her only Twitter interfacing is through me), "Well, on Twitter she's verso, but she also goes by Banana Lee Fishbones. ... I can't remember her actual name, though." Other people would introduce themselves to me like this: "I'm Jason. Jason Grigsby. ... You know, grigs."

In fact, it was this disconnect between online social activity and such activity in meatspace that was frustrating. Through online activity, you can learn what city or neighborhood a person lives in, if he's married or has kids, what he does for a living, and what his hobbies are. All before you ever talk to him in real life.

And in fact, knowing all that stuff can actually make it harder to talk to him in real life. I know, I've tried:

Me: Hey, you're Jim, right?

Jim: ... Maybe ...

Me: Yeah, I recognized you from your icon. You live in Tigard, right?

Jim: Um ... yeah ...

Me: How's your wife? Surgery go okay?

Jim: Get away from me! Stalker!

Okay, maybe not quite like that, but it's still awkward to introduce yourself to someone you've never met, only to have them nod their head to say "yes, I know all that already."

So how best to deal with this issue, which we surely will face more and more in the future? I guess people like me who are mildly shy could stop using online social tools, which only give us a false sense of hope that we know how to deal with strangers.

But I'd like to think that a better solution would be to just stop meeting people in real life. That way, we don't judge people by their looks or their ability to make smalltalk, but merely on their ability to type.