When I opened this account, I decided to upload an image of my experimental “teacher” avatar from Second Life.  (I got cold feet and took it down, but I’ll probably get it up here at some point soon.)  After I uploaded it, I got the message about my “blavatar.”  Wow!  I thought how did they know?  But of course, a blavatar is just an image that follows your blog around, and it was just a coincidence that my blavatar was, actually, a blogging avatar.  I got interested in the lexicon that is opening up around these various technologies of social networking and found that there seem to be two terms arriving for more or less the same thing–favicon and gravitar both seem to identify the little images that accompany some URLs, such as the one you see now at the top of your browser for WordPress, a W encased in a blue sphere.  What’s really amazing to me is the term avatar and how it is taking the world by storm.  Tomorrow (it’s late, zzzz) I’m going to do some more research on the word avatar itself and try to track its evolution…..probably someone has already done that, but I’m curious.

It reminds me of a conversation I overheard in graduate school.  (A great deal of memorable experiences from my grad school years were overheard conversations in the fishbowl of offices in the tower in which we were stacked.  I was a creative writing major, always on the search for fresh material, and I found it there.)  This prof was trying to get out of a meeting and wanted to send “one of his emissaries” in his place.  It was the first time I had every heard anyone talk like that in real life–I had never known anyone who had an emissary, let alone admit it aloud–and I knew then that my life was headed in some really radical new direction.  Oh yeah.