Bill Cammack

I dropped my e-Stalking series in 2008.

At the time, I was talking about asynchronously getting to know someone by reading their blog posts, listening to their podcasts, watching their videos & live streams and coming to your own conclusion about who they are, what they’re like and what they like to do without them ever knowing that you exist.

e-Stalking makes perfect sense because people tend to share what they care about online to the degree that they’re willing to be judged by what they wrote. Trust Me.. You can learn way more about someone in 20 minutes of consuming their media than you can during 20 minutes of banter with them and three other people standing around at an IRL social function. Read the rest of this entry »

So I stopped by Melissa’s blog, and I’m skimming/reading her ideas, and I see this post called Stalking 101. The reason I decided to blog about reading her post is that she was blogging about exactly what I was doing at the time. :)

I decided to check out her reasons for googling people (searching for references to their names or sites they author or are a part of like, Bill, for instance :D) to see if they were similar to my own.

To paraphrase, here are her reasons:

1 ) Being an introvert (including potentially appearing “maladroit at small talk”)
2 ) Needing context for conversations
3 ) Wanting to ‘get to know someone’ before engaging them in “inspiring conversation”
4 ) Attempting to form a fairly complete picture of you based on your online thoughtstream
5 ) Giving the stalkee the respect of wanting to know more about them
6 ) Respecting the time you’ve spent in putting information about yourself on the net
7 ) Wanting to have a meaningful interaction with the stalkee IRL
8 ) Relieving them of redundantly explaining their life story

My reasons for e-stalking overlap with hers at several points, but I have a couple of different ones, which I’ll get to… Read the rest of this entry »