Bluejake

Yesterday I wrote a humorous post about Celebrity Blog Commenting in which I mentioned a few prominent bloggers by name. About five minutes after I posted the article, both Anil Dash and Jason Kottke had left comments on the site. This struck me as an amazing property of the blog- it allows you to almost instantaneously summon anyone to your site. I thought about this, and realized that I had stumbled across a genuine scientific quality that can be ascribed to any person who uses the internet. I call this property the Summoning Interval- the exact amount of time between when someone mentions your full name on a webpage anywhere on the internet and the moment you end up at that page reading the post that contains your name. For bloggers and media types, the Summoning Interval is almost laughably small- I'd estimate between five minutes and about two days. Many factors can explain the short interval- constant browsing of your own referral logs, maniacal self-googling, total information awareness. For normal citizens, the Summoning Interval is probably quite long- a matter of months or even years. For some people, it probably approaches infinity- they'll die before they ever get around to reading what has been written about them. I'd like to pretend I'm one of these, but let's be honest: if you mention my name on your page I'll probably see it in less than a day.

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