Samantha Garner, Freelance Web Writer & Editor

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a friend of mine about different confusing things that’ve happened around my name. He mentioned it’d be a good blog post, so here it is. Let it not be said I don’t take suggestions well!

Over the years, both before and after I got married and changed my name, I’ve encountered a few other “Me”s. Here are my favourites:

1) My Twin From the Other Side of the World

The main reason I took my husband’s name when I got married is because I liked it better than mine. Another – minor – reason is that my old last name was often mispronounced and misspelled and, after so many years, it really bugged me. However, I received some comfort when I stumbled upon another woman with my exact name online. The funny thing is – she was a writer too! We even had similar writing styles. If she didn’t live on the other side of the world I might have been a bit more creeped out about it than I was. Shortly after I’d Googled myself and found her, she’d Googled herself and found me. We exchanged emails and she was quite charming, though emailing “myself” was very surreal. My name was unique enough that I’d never encountered someone else by that name before. Sometimes I feel like I should email my twin now and tell her, “You win – the name’s yours!”

2) The Bizarro Me

On a certain social network which shall remain nameless, there exists a Samantha Garner who is my age and lives in my city. However, she is very much not me and, if prospective clients Googled me and thought she was me, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t ever hear from them. Don’t get me wrong, whatever Bizarro Me wants to do on her slice of the internet is cool and I don’t begrudge her anything, but it’s why I put a photo of myself up on this site in the latest redesign. My name is my brand, so I want to make sure I’m representing myself accurately. Future clients need not worry – I keep my private life locked down tight on this here internet.

3) The Other Wordscience

The name of my blog, Wordscience, follows a theme I’ve used often in names for things online. It started from a phrase I misheard on TV: “new science.” At the time, it resonated with me. I thought that new science would be a pretty neat thing to experience. The sound of the phrase and its attendant imagery stuck with me, and I used variations of it over the years. So, it made sense that I’d call my blog Wordscience. The problem is, when I went to register Wordscience as a Twitter name, I discovered it already existed – and her name was Samantha too! Fair enough, she got there first. And so WordscienceBlog is my Twitter name. It’s also why I use the word “blog” in the blog’s name even though that’s gauche. Sometimes necessity is the mother of gaucheness.

This weekend was spent with a few fun people I know in a small-town B&B cabin. It was meant to be a ski trip, but only two people went to the mountain. The rest of us spent time in a coffeeshop in an old church, and browsing a very small but very amazing secondhand book store. There was good food, board games, lots of loud laughing – all ingredients of a great trip! My husband and I left Friday and returned yesterday morning. We were tired and relaxed and it took some time do “recompress” and come back to real life.

When I returned, I checked my usual links (that I’d ignored over the weekend) and saw that the Freelance Writing Jobs Network posted this: From a Man with a Pen to a Lady with a LapTop: An Inteview with Deb Dorchak a/k/a Harrison McLeod. It seems that Deb D was the person who “outed” James Chartrand.

I’m not going to comment too much on it here, as I know this story is already huge. I jokingly compared it to a soap opera in my last post about it, but real people are involved and I don’t want to stir any pots or whatever metaphor you like to use. I just wanted to link to another part of the story since I’d brought it up earlier.

Anyway, go check out the post on the Freelance Writing Jobs Network. Deb N does an admirable job with it, considering both parties involved are friends of hers!

I have been a bad blogger. I haven’t been feeling the love lately, to be honest. I’ve been viewing blogging almost as a chore, rather than the fun hobby it’s been since 1997. To be honest, a lot of it is down to a couple of projects I’ve been working on that have taken up a lot of my time. I’m having corrective eye surgery next week (ack!) and won’t be able to do any work for a few days and so am making sure things get done early.

Don’t get me wrong, these are fun projects and I’m not by any means complaining about them taking up the time they are. But they are sapping my will to blog, a little bit. This, I suppose, is exactly the time that the “write posts in advance and queue them” advice comes in handy, non?

Anyway, blogging, I hope you’ll forgive me. I could use some tips on blogging despite complete disinterest, if anyone has any they’d like to share.

I need a comment policy.

I had been gathering some comments in my spam queue that I flip-flopped on for a while. Now, I know what obvious spam is. Comments that are full of irrelevant links, or comments that are clearly not related to my post at all get deleted right away. But what confused me were the comments that seemed like they could be relevant, despite having a site listed in the Website field that existed only to hawk a product.

I went back and forth about it for a while and then consulted Twitter. There wasn’t really a consensus, but one friend of mine said, sensibly, “Aren’t they all sales websites? lol. If you are suspicious of their intentions then don’t approve them. It’s your house.”

So I approved one of them. I did so because this comment, while it could have been self-serving, did seem like it could also be contributing to my post. I approved it and thought no more about it.

Until I got another comment on another post that was exactly the same.

Well there. I got burned.

I’ve decided I’m going to craft an actual comment policy. It will say, basically, if your website is set up solely to sell your product, you’d better go out of your way to leave me a comment that is 100% relevant to my post. Not copywriting, not art, not the title of my blog. It might sound harsh (and I doubt that spammers will even read it!), but it has to be done.

What do you think? Do you have a zero-tolerance policy on comment spammers or do you often get burned like me?

(And yes, I know I might get comment spam on this post. At this point it would actually be funny, cosmically.)

Yesterday, when on my way home from Gail’s seminar, I started thinking about the way the web has changed since “my day.” I know that’s kind of a silly phrase, because A) It’s still “my day,” and B) Only 75-year-olds say “my day.” Either way, it really amazes me how different things are online since 1997 when I first started being active on the web.

It’s okay to use your real name now

I can’t count the number of aliases I had in the ’90s. Back then, it’s kind of what you did. There were a few people that blogged under their real names, but most of us didn’t. If your “real life” friends found out you were active online, you would be labelled a freak! It was about as socially acceptable as whooping cough. Thankfully, we can now spend less time thinking up clever aliases and more time building blogging communities as real people.

There were no “bloggers” then

When I started blogging, it wasn’t blogging – it was “online journalling.” I remember when Blogger started and slowly started moving through the ranks of online personal writers. Back then, hand-coding your site in Notepad was a badge of honour – some of us even proudly displayed icons on our sites bragging about it. Blogger was kind of divisive back then and yes, I was one of the purists who decried it as too simple, a tool for de-personalization. Now, thankfully, I am wrong. Yes, it’s a bit more bite-sized now, but blogging is just as personal and community-building as “the old way.”

Blogging is more credible now

Blogs turning into books? Being cited as sources on the news? These were impossible dreams in 1997! Then, lots of people didn’t see the appeal of personal websites. It was much more than “this is what I ate for lunch” – it was sharing experiences and ideas and discussing them with people all over the world who felt the same way (or didn’t). It’s been truly remarkable to see the world at large slowly come around to this idea, making blogging more powerful than it ever was.

Image courtesy of stock.xchng user PocketAces.