The Web Has A Life Of Its Own

Just about all of us have had an experience with something going out in email, or being posted on the web, and having it take on a life of its own. (If you haven't, you will ... or maybe you just don't know about it yet!) I just had it reinforced.

A week ago, I sent out an email that announced some news from my art studio. It was pretty benign: I'm going to have paintings in three juried shows over the next two months, plus two solo shows this fall. So I wrote up a nice little blurb and sent it out to people on my email list. And promptly forgot about it.

So just a few minutes ago, I googled myself to see what, if anything, was new in my world. I found out that the local newspaper (Asheville Citizen-Times) ran my email as a news article almost verbatim. Pretty cool! And then I found that there were at least twelve other sites (count 'em, 12) that had the Citizen-Times article on their pages as well! Some of them seemed to make sense: they're local news sites or something. Others, I can't figure out what the hell they are. And some look downright strange. It was a strange experience to read my own newsgram on somebody else's really weird site. (By "weird", I don't mean goth or anything like that. I just mean that there doesn't seem to be any rationale behind the site at all. Just a collection of random bits of information and links.)

I also found several recent notices that a show of my prints is going on at a local business. What's really interesting is that the show never happened. When I went to install it, I found out that the company had gone out of business. So I took my prints and went home, considering myself extremely fortunate to have found out before the works were hung. A notice of the show's cancellation went out to local newspapers, but it doesn't seem to matter to these web sites. According to them, my prints are still hanging there, months after the place closed up.

So be careful what you post - it just might come back to haunt you!