Venture Geek

I was talking with a friend of mine a few weeks ago about our differing opinions on self-disclosure on the web. I have a little personal web site that I made a few years ago when I was doing some consulting and needed a way for people to learn about me — since then I have kept it updated, and it serves as a way for folks who for whatever reason come to care who I am to learn something about me. I’ve gone back and forth on whether it’s hokey or a good respresentation of my professional self.

One of things I have on that site is a page with just about every virtual way to contact me — email, phone, and the various instant messaging handles. My friend said that eventually I’d starting getting IM spam (”spim” as it’s often called, though I hate the “sp_m” thing for every new kind of spam) and/or would just generally be unhappy to have disclosed so much about myself and how to get a hold of me. As someone who really came of age professionally during the rise of the Web, I have tended towards being “out there” as a good thing (in the mid-90s I was very active on various discussion groups and as a result my email address was spread far and wide, and I do get unbelievable amounts of spam to this day because of it — but, that’s a different topic).

Tonight I received a call to my Skype account from “Chris” (I originally was going to put his handle here, but I decided that was too snarky). I know several people named Chris, but none of them are currently on my Skype contact list. I sent an IM back explaining that it’s late here and I can’t talk — I tend to prefer text-based IM over voice chats for most short conversations anyway. Chris, though insisted that I talk to him, and after he kept calling again and again and again it became pretty clear that “he” is not actually one of my friends named Chris but rather some random person who for whatever reason really really wanted me to talk to him. The short of it is, for the first time ever I actively blocked someone from one of my IM services.

Obviously, this isn’t that big a deal, and it hasn’t soured me on IM or anything.  And I don’t think I’ll be taking down my contact page or blocking other people from finding me in the various directories.

Now that I’ve written this into a blog post, I’m not sure why you’d care, but hey, blogging is about first-hand experiences, right? Anyone else had unwelcomed IM interactions?