Mathemagenic

This time I check my referrers at Technorati (via Bloglines subscription) to my familyskyping post it feels creepy.

There is nothing there that is not online, so why feeling creepy?

The details that I usually choose not to make instanly visible are made visible in one post. It also goes across online spaces, linking my story about using Skype in the family to my wedding photos on Flickr.

This is the first time I see the weblog that links to me and it's scary how someone "I have no idea who he is" went to collect all that details to put them in one place. I would feel totally different if it would be someone I recognise as a regular reader of my weblog.

I wonder how Robert would react to it. Not only I blogged about his communication with my mom, but now the whole story is at some strange website accompanied by our wedding photo.

Of course, things are not that scary. Very fast I figure out that the post was actually syndicated from Skype journal that I know well and that the original was written by Phil Wolff and starts from "A friend of mine, metablogger and social media scholar Lilia Efimova" invisible in the Technorati quote. And I talk to Robert - he doesn't mind...

I feel much better now - the context Phil provides makes a lot of sense for a reader not reading my weblog, I'm not surprised that he knew all those details and I actually like how he cropped my photo for the post :)

What is still strange is how much my feeling of creepy or not with my personal online dots connected in one place depends on the context: who connects the dots, why and how...

And a side note. Phil says:

Note the Skype infection spreading through the family vector. Not just within her household (Lilia to Robert, I think) but also across households, to her mother. Someday genealogists will be mining Skype social networks to discover family ties.

Phil's assumption of Robert picking up Skype from me actually made Robert more unhappy than any of the personal things revealed online :) So, I have to say that this is not true (both of us used SKype before getting together) and that in general Robert is pretty much the same early adopter as I am (actually, he has more gadgets than me, I just blog more :), so all ideas of who might be the first in the family are likely to be wrong.

Also - Phil has a really bunch of interesting ideas about framing Skype for the workplace and an on-going quest for Knowledge Management selection criteria for Skype.