nellardo's Journal: Blogger Small World

So just yesterday, I finally put together an odd little "Six Degrees of Separation" between the Ambiguous blog and me. I found this gently amusing - perhaps you will too.

Now, as it happens, I'm working on a book for uber-geek publisher O'Reilly. And it's a Mac OS X book, so I went out to the west coast for their OSXCon at the beginning of October. While there, Chuck Toporek invited me to the O'Reilly party for editors and authors. Late in the evening, this exuberant Canuck in pants three sizes too large comes in, declining beer on account of his much-vaunted no-carbs diet and declining beer for one of his two friends on account of her expectant status.

Well, you may recognize the Canuck in Question as Cory Doctorow, scion of the EFF, Freedom Fighter for Steamboat Willie, and sometime-panelist at O'Reilly conferences. The other two were Quinn Norton and Danny O'Brien, recent guest bloggers at BoingBoing. I didn't actually get any of their names that night - though we did joke about how "Open Source Needs Women!" (Quinn was perhaps the second female in the room the entire night - might have been the third, depending on what she's presently incubating).

Cory was of course exuberant and hard to miss during most of the rest of the conference. That exuberance and Mark Frauenfelder's quiet cluelessness caused me to check out this "boing-boing" thing. Right as I do this, I notice a couple of suspiciously familiar quest bloggers.

"Oh, cool - I know them," I think to myself. Eventually (i.e., last night), I notice that the suspiciously familiar guest bloggers are guest bloggers no more, so I head over to the home blog of the now-being-stalked Quinn. Routine investigation shows that there's another prime blogger there by the name of Robin.

Robin Skyler.

Bells start ringing. "Oh, how funny - I know someone in the poly community here in New York with that same name." Can't be the same person, can it? "What - this 'Robin Skyler' is poly too??"

Well, once I saw Robin talking about Miriam and Rebecca, whom I've known from before Robin and Miriam and Rebecca became "Robin and Miriam and Rebecca", I had figured out that, no, there weren't two tall poly guys named "Robin Skyler" running around New York City.

And so, that's my quiet little story of two degrees of separation. FTF coincidental meetings across the continent.

Hope you enjoyed it, and keep those stalkers at bay.