and that I may have been thinking about, but maybe didn’t bring up because I wanted to post it on the blog. In its list of “tools for online communication," the wiki article that we read on Social Software devotes a brief paragraph to this thing called “virtual presence,” which does not, as yet, have its own wikipedia article (although one has been requested), and which creeps me out about as much as some people were creeped out by Shelley Jackson’s designation of people as words in her Skin project. The paragraph defining virtual presence really is brief, so I’m going to cite the whole thing here:

Virtual presence means being present at virtual locations. In particular, the term virtual presence denotes presence on World Wide Web locations pages and Web sites which are identified by URLs. People who are browsing a Web site are considered to be virtually present at Web locations. Virtual presence is a social software in the sense that people meet on the Web by chance or intentionally. The ubiqitous [sic] (in the Web space) communication transfers behavior patterns from the real world and Virtual worlds to the Web.