So, I was googling around looking for something I kind of remember Al Giordano saying one time, and the first thing I came to mentioned me. I had totally forgotten that this happened to me while I was in Austin for the 2008 Netroots Nation conference:
Thursday mid-day update: Lots of workshops and caucuses going on this morning at the Austin Convention Center (with the best stuff happening, as always, out on the smokers’ decks). One of the troublemakers I keep bumping into there is Booman, who told an interesting story of the morning festivities.
Booman perused the conference schedule and saw that a “Lurkers’ Caucus” would be taking place. “Lurkers,” in blogspeak, are the readers that never comment online. That be most of you. (The whole concept of a lurkers’ caucus invokes images of some kind of silent movie where everybody sits around and says nothing, but apparently in reality they’re quite talkative outside of the screen.) So Booman sits down in the back of the caucus hall and starts typing into his laptop when one of the lurkers recognizes him as an outspoken blogger. And then it was “Hey, you’re not a lurker! Get outta here!” So, lurking is fine – we love our lurkers, too – but no lurking at the lurkers’ caucus!
True story. If only the person responsible would de-lurk and take credit for kicking me out of the lurkers’ caucus where I was trying, and failing, to lurk.
But one would assume that talking at the lurkers’ caucus would have been okay.
Do you mean as a guest speaker? Or was my problem that I was lurking?
I guess that you can talk with/speak to lurkers but not lurk with them.
the great irony is that I lurked on the lurkers and they found my behavior offensive.
Tribalism at its best.
Ha! I remember that.
Now I’m craving green chili beer…
*chile
heh
At a certain stage, in your blogging career, you lose your lurking rights. It’s like a private citizen becoming a celebrity or a public figure, suddenly what you say and do is news. Lurking is for those who want to keep their hiding places… and don’t what to be exposed by the bright lights of publicity.