Just Who Has Been Reading This Blog?!

Mashable.com, via Google Reader, informs me of a new service being launched by Pitney Bowes, the postage-meter pioneer.


Described as "a free digital mailbox in 2011 that will allow customers to pay multiple bills online without remembering more than one password," it sounds like a winner.


But the name they came up for it?


Volly.


WTF?  Pay bills online?  Password problems?  Have my recent PayPal woes inspired a new innovation? Are Mr. Pitney and/or Mr. Bowes lurking here somewhere?  And aren't they dead?


Yeah, a coincidence, no doubt, but there's more than enough strangeness in my life without this.


I'm not going to go into the history of my blog handle; it's boring and unnecessary -- but this news resurrects an issue I've been pondering for awhile, having to do with the handle and the blog venue and everything else.  I like Blogger just fine, but I set this site up about 7 years ago, shortly after the service was acquired by Google, and when Gmail was still invite-only.  So it links to a non-Google email for login, and it's a medium-grade pain because I spend a lot of time on Gmail and other things that link to the Gmail address I've had for about 3 years now.  Anytime I want to post here or comment on someone else's post, I have to change the email on Google in order to pop up as Volly.  


 Damn technology, won't sit still...


This development might motivate me to just go and move the whole works over to my Gmail address.  I already have a blog there, but abandoned it several months ago.  Who knows, I might change the handle, and re-reinvent myself.  I've got aliases all over the internet, for the usual reasons of privacy and paranoia, and have what I think is a better than average level of awareness of where the "degrees of separation" are.  With Facebook, I took the plunge, using my real name (wasn't that a scary moment, fellow Facebookers?  What courage we have!) and have since friended a few of the bloggers I read, with a request message that generally read "Hi, this is Volly from the blog," so they'd recognize the name.  Same with Twitter, except the intro usually wasn't necessary for following.  


There are a few people on my blog list who have done this -- either changed their handle, renamed their blog, or moved the host to WordPress or an independent domain.  But the prospect is still daunting -- a lot of work, a medium amount of risk to privacy, and the biggest worry, losing contact with some of the people here who have come to mean a lot in my online life.  Those who have done something similar, how much of a chore was it, anyway?  Wanna share?


In the meantime, I'll just go about my business and ponder the eternal mysteries of life.


Such as, where the hell did they come up with the name Volly?