Chap down the road on Flickr!

I had one of those internet moments recently which must come to everybody sooner or later. I was looking at the London bloggers tubemap, and studying the weblogs for Richmond, my nearest station, where I am entered. They have now updated the station entries so that you also see a selection of photos that people have posted on flickr most recently with the tag "richmond". This works much better with more obscure station names such as Hammersmith, as the Richmond page seems to be swamped with pictures of Richmond, Virginia, and the Kingston page alternates images of The Bentall Centre with colourful photos of Jamaica. Anyway, I was looking at these when I saw a picture of Ham (Ham is about 2 miles from Richmond, but it is still technically a Richmond address). I then clicked onto the flickr photos for the person who had posted this, and recognised a chap and his wife who live about 100 yards away. I've now seen them on a variety of holidays, and walking around the local area. It's quite strange knowing that we'll walk past each other in the street, and they won't realise that I've seen it. I don't suppose they'd mind, or they wouldn't have posted their snaps on the net. I would feel a bit strange saying anything though:
"Hi there, you don't know me, but that hotel in Majorca looked nice."

It did get me wondering, however, whether anybody who passes me in the street has read this blog. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that this blog is so popular that I'm in danger of becoming a local celebrity. But devices like the London bloggers' tubemap would mean that many bloggers within a 3 or 4 mile radius would probably have checked out whether anybody else is doing it locally and had a look at my blog, even if only to discover it wasn't really for them.

I'm not a particularly anonymous blogger; I use a pseudonym, but in previous posts I've posted links to some fiction sites that show stories posted under my real name. I assume the pseudonym means that you can't just find my blog if you google my name, but I might put my name on the site at some point; as a fiction writer, it's silly to want to be anonymous. I'm not Belle du Jour. We don't have a digital camera, so I don't post photos, but again, it isn't a hard and fast rule.

Oh what the hell. If any of my previous boyfriends are googling me (and I've been known to do it to them): Rebecca Billings.