Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

Recent Items
 
Blog, Wiki? WIki, Blog? Oh what to do!
 
The Long Tail Meme
 
Goodbye, "Pre-Approved Offer"
 
Open Source: Taking Food from the Mouths of Capitalist Babies?
 
Scoble Links: Overwhelm of the Solitary Connector
 
Don Knuth on Science as Art and Scholarship as Community Effort
 
Agreeing While Disagreeing
 
Addressing Customer Demands?
 
Crushing Supply-Push Under Demand-Pull
 
The fearful state of on-line students

Situated in CyberSpace: orcmid, Scoble, and those other guys.

LLRX.com - Internal Blogs: So, Are They Different From External Blogs?.  The post I'm linking to is not by me.  That's one of the other Dennis Hamilton's that is visible in the IT world.

This is my first encounter with this particular Dennis Hamilton, and it all came to pass because I took on the Scoble practice of watching for my own name(s) (not Scoble) in a PubSub query.  The article on Internal Blogs has been linked by Adam Gaffin, writing in NetworkWorldFusion on 2005-03-29 (I should be so lucky).  That's how I got wind of it.   Yesterday, lockergnome picks up on that Hamilton's article.  Now that really hurts, Chris [;<).

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This incident reminds me of the value of having an identity situated in cyberspace in a unique and memorable way.  Robert Scoble has the advantage of an under-used surname, and the Scoble and Scobleizer slots are essentially his, thanks to Google ranking and the extended community of linkers that reinforces his cyber-identity.  It also makes it easy for him (or any of us) to quickly determine what others are saying about Scoble's posts and connections.

I already knew that my long-time (back when the CompuServe system was called Micronet) nom de net, Orcmid, was unique enough to situate me in cyberspace as a distinct entity.  The only problem is that the juice from Google is triggered by links that I have created between my own web pages.  A query on "orcmid" is dominated by some terribly banal gunk related to how I maintain my web pages and attribute their authorship and maintenance.  This swamps the ranking of anything that people have found interesting on Orcmid's Lair, for example.  I didn't think about this (and hadn't ever seen a blog or worried myself about Google juice) when I took on the practice.  Fortunately, modern science has provided a cure.  As I maintain my web pages, and create new ones, I am using rel="nofollow" on my internal links to the "What's an Orcmid?" page appearing on every one of my sites.  Not that anyone cares, mind you.  I just don't want to give the impression that Orcmid is some cyber-homeless character living under the shelter of crumpled web maintenance pages serving in the absence of old, crumpled newspapers.

I have one lingering concern about the unique pedigree of Orcmid.  I used it for the very first time (in 1979 or 1980) as commander of the Empire Cruiser "Goblin" when dialed-up to a DecSystem 10 and playing "DecWars."  One of my on-line adversaries wanted to know if the name was inspired by Doonesbury. I didn't know what he was talking about.  He showed me a clipping in which Zonker Harris is playing a video game on his TV and is imagining himself as Orcmid slaying alien invaders.  I can't swear I didn't see that though I have no recollection of it.  I had figured out the name by strugging in a dictionary, along with knowing that orcs figured in Dungeons & Dragons (and, Tolkien-challenged as I am, I didn't know what they were). I also wonder if the guys at the University of Rochester Strong Memorial Hospital computer center were simply messing with my head.

posted by orcmid at 4/7/2005 11:34:07 AM