There are numerous versions of Chandler's paper on home pages and identity. The May, 1997, edition was the one I last printed out for myself over two years ago. But in preparing this review of the pertinent literature I decided to see if a new edition was available. It was, from November 1998. That in itself wasn't particularly surprising, or significant, but as I read it I couldn't withstand a cry of surprise when I discovered that my Boidem column on home pages, The Cult of Home Pages, was footnoted. Chandler is most definitely a main player in this field, and I have to admit not only to surprise, but also to satisfaction, upon discovering that he'd read, and even quoted, my piece on the topic.
I don't know how Chandler got to my piece, though perhaps he was checking references to himself, because that particular column refers to him, and to his invitation to send him URLs of personal home pages so that he can review them. There's something interestingly recursive at work here, but that's not the topic of this thesis.
Perhaps I'm always one to kick a gift horse in the mouth. Having been footnoted by an authority, perhaps I'd do better to keep contentedly quiet than to complain, but Chandler seems to make an interesting, and inaccurate, assumption about me. In the paragraph in which he quotes from the Boidem and from other reviews of home pages Chandler remarks:
... it is easy for published writers to be so dismissive. As academics, slow as the process may sometimes be, we are used to being published and to our ideas being taken seriously....The Boidem is located on an academic server, but its author is still rather far from being an academic, and even suffers from something along the lines of an identity crisis when he tries to see himself in such a role.
Also of interest regarding that footnote is the fact that the URL that
Chandler gives for the Boidem column is old, and no longer accurate. If,
by chance, someone wants to find that column, they won't, alas, find it
through clicking on Chandler's link.