If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it really fall?  If I can't find you online, do you really exist?  Maybe you're just invisible and you don't know it...

Sometimes we ask ourselves funny questions - a few examples being noted above.  I'm in the marketing profession.  I meet people on a regular basis and use technology extensively.  Lately, when I meet people, I go online and check out the various social networks, people finders and search engines to see what I can learn about them.  If I can't find them I wonder where they've been and what they do.  If they're in the marketing profession and I can't find them online do they really exist?  Or if they do, where have they been hiding for the last five years?

Funny questions, but take a short list of people that you know or have recently met and search for them on Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Spock, Wink, Bebo and Spoke.  If you can't find them anywhere - especially in the marketing profession - should you be worried?

In my own background, I know lots of people that I are a little challenging to find online.  Plantation workers on remote islands, lumberjacks, welders, tree pruners and sawmill workers.  I don't see much of them online but they truly exist and remain good friends.

Its funny how technology paints our perspectives of life and those around us.  I like to think of technology as an enabler of making informed choices... and yet, even with its grand ambitions - it remains quite limited.

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