Ran across a term called blog chalking in my various wanderings. Near as I can figure, you tag your blog with geographical identifiers, plus tags for name and age. Those can then be used by search engines to find blogs of folks living near you, etc.

I _like_ the anonymity of the web, knowing someone just by their material, ideas, and visual presentation. To discover that they lived across the street from me would be depressing, actually. One would hope to interact enough with the people around you to determine that they are interesting people – to discover that you’ve overlooked an amazingly interesting person that geographically close would suggest that 1) either I’m completely dense, or 2) that this person has determined that I’m not interesting. Either way, fairly depressing.

It would be an amazing gift to discover via the web that you’ve found someone whose ideas, etc, are interesting. But life’s too complicated to count on that person being geographically near, or even, in some cases, to _want_ that person to be geographically near. Geographic closeness almost implies that folks ought to meet in person. And who needs one extra thing that one “ought” to do?