God bless the Internet

In last Friday’s post, I asked friends and strangers in the blogospehere to help me locate a man named Jeff Shaffer. He wrote a fantastic article in the Christian Science Monitor about wearing nametags.

I immediately received several letters from people who’d searched for his information on InfoSpace.com, Linkdin, Catbird Press, Google and the like. But because it was the weekend, I figured I’d wait till Monday to verify the information.

THEN…exactly 55 hours and 42 minutes later, I received an email from Jeff Shaffer himself! He was actually Googling his recent column and came across my blog post!

Oh, the irony.

Jeff and I marveled about the ease with which we found each other on the web. (As it turns out, the information people sent me was for a different Jeff Shaffer.) But then again, it’s really not that surprising how easy it was…

Let me take you back to December 31st, 2002 when HELLO, my name is Scott was officially released. As many of you know, The Portland Tribune ran an article about it, which hit a news wire, led to an explosion of publicity and ultimately birthed my career as an author, speaker and publisher.

But what you may NOT know is that the day that article came out, I received a late night phone call from a strange man who ended up stalking me for about two months. He called me daily, left creepy messages on my answering machine and even showed up at the furniture store where I worked!

All because he got my cell phone number from my website.

Damn. Maybe I was too approachable.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

Has the web decreased our anonymity?

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Scott Ginsberg
Author/Speaker/That guy with the nametag
www.hellomynameisscott.com