gement | Branding myself

It's coming to my attention that when embarking on a professional job hunt in a technologically loaded field, it might be time to get my own domain. And like the archetypical quest for the perfect pair of heels, this is difficult.

I don't want it to be ferrets. I don't want it to be fannish. I don't want it to need explaining. I don't want it to be hard to spell. I want it to say something about who I really want to be professionally. I'm choosing a metaphor, and I'm going to be sticking with it a while because these things have momentum and I can't be bothered to remake myself every year at this point.

I gasp at the brilliance and audacity of bookslut.com, ecolibrarian.org, and our own

datavore. I love delicious little two word visions like

dancing_camel and

lunar__angel (and yes, I know how you ended up with that one, L, and I still love it) and I'd be fine with grabbing one of those except none are sticking to me right now.

I have bought into all the pleasant things they tell you in library school about how we are the next great new hope for connecting people and their information in the best possible ways. I feel like a lot of my life, or at least a lot of what I'd like my life to be about, is connecting things anyway.

I like the metaphor of the gateway and of the gatekeeper. I'm good with being a gatekeeper. Even if it weren't overused, though, I want to refine it more. The vision people usually get from that metaphor is the gate with the Emerald City on the inside and the people who want in on the outside. The way I look at it, the city starves if you don't let people in, and every work has a creator who wants it seen as widely as possible.

I don't like that it's binary in any case. And, speaking personally, I know that I'm not binary and probably never will be. Personally and professionally, I feel more like regulating traffic at a ten-way intersection, or weaving new patterns from old threads. I want to unlock the secrets, because a fact that no one knows isn't knowledge anymore.

The other day, I took a non-Euclidean spaghetti map for a Kingdom of Loathing adventuring area the other day and turned it into a clearly organized circuit diagram. I'd want to be a technical writer if I weren't deathly allergic to deadlines. I drool at typography discussions because they're talking about how to cram more into people's heads with less effort so more people can know more about what they want to know.

Now I'll have to go de-spaghetti that, too. But you see what I mean.

My last business cards said "Data Wrangler" on them. But that's taken. Eerily, .com and .org were taken as of yesterday, and as of today all three were taken. Anyone know if the squatters are capable of basing buys on what people are checking for?

But anyway. I'm bridging, I'm weaving, I'm opening gates, I'm simplifying... what am I doing and what are the beautiful words for it?