Having an online presence is something I've chosen for myself. This site has been going since October 2001 - 13+ years! I had my first web page in 1995 ish - a combination of the Internet Archive not going back that far and me not remembering my old username means I can't show that page to you. Back in those days we used NCSA Mosaic and thought that Netscape was the future!

Anyway, I digress.

Things happen when you're online. Some of them are good some are not. I think fighting with occasional ebay buyers and sellers is probably a bad aspect of being online. I'm sure that someone on ebay once threatened to show up at a gig of mine and attack me. They never bothered - or if they did I didn't realise if it was them or not. I'm not even entirely sure that the time I chose to get my money's worth out of an ebay seller who had poorly packed their item from the states, causing the disc to snap (it was sent out of its box) and had even made the postage using something like 1 cent stamps, and then refused to give me a refund, was time well spent - I basically entered into a slanging match with him which brought out his most racist and my most sanctimonious sides.

One new thing about being online is the presence of online PR folks. They constantly Google themselves - they probably have Google Alerts set up in fairness - to see if there's any bad stuff about them and then, if there is, they spring into action.

In recent events, I was contacted by a company whom I mentioned negatively. They were very nice about how poorly I'd received their product and sent me more of it to see if that would sway my opinion. That's quite impressive, given that nobody reads this blog except me and now this PR person and perhaps you, unless you're me or the PR person, in which case, you don't count - or at least you do, but you're already counted.

That's the modern world. One's online presence is weirdly blurred with one's real presence.

It's a shame I lost my original site. I should try to find it again.