Because under 7 is nasty. You're fucking kidding me, right? Fuck myspace.

The safety tips page on myspace interests me. If you run across racism or inappropriate postings, report to myspace or the authorities. If you're a pedophile, you're in deep trouble - myspace will delete your user profile! (Same goes if you're in fifth grade and have a myspace).

Maybe I'm being too negative - I guess it's kind of important that they'd have a page like this, but they do kinda hide it along the bottom row of "about" and "faq" links that nobody ever dares to go to...

The links to other sites are a nice touch, although I think if I were fifteen and on myspace, I'd be immediately put off by all of them, from the casual use of the letter Z to be hip, or the run-by-the-local-police-department feel.

The parent tips part of the safety tips page is interesting, too - myspace sorta owns up to being a teen hangout, instead of a place where you can map your family tree (as they suggest on the about page, which i linked to in my previous post). Basically the same things are written as are on the page geared towards kids, just reworded for parents.

Clicking on the links to remove your child's profile just takes you to the general page for deleting a profile at all. The faulty logic is that parents share email addresses with their kids. Something tells me that a kid who has a myspace account probably has his or her own email address too.

Let's compare the mission statements, if you will, of facebook and myspace:

facebook: Facebook is a social utility that helps people better understand the world around them.

myspace: MySpace is an online community that lets you meet your friends' friends

I just thought the contrast was interesting, since the sites do essentially the same thing, although facebook is more compartmentalized:

Facebook is made up of many networks - individual schools, companies or regions - each of which are independent and closed off to non-affiliated users.

You can tell what site started with what aim, or with what target group. Facebook for college students (and Harvard ones at that), and Myspace for, well,

Friends who want to talk Online
Single people who want to meet other Singles
Matchmakers who want to connect their friends with other friends
Families who want to keep in touch--map your Family Tree
Business people and co-workers interested in networking
Classmates and study partners
Anyone looking for long lost friends!

by which i mean kids in high school and, apparently, Rasheet Richmond, the first user profile that comes up when you google "myspace". He's important, man, he's been in the new york times! He has over 13000 friends!

what can i say about LJ that hasn't been said already? The communities are a cool function, to be sure. It's a network more geared towards building relationships. But when you login (i used to have an LJ back in the day) or even just look at the home page, it's definitely, like myspace, targeted at the youngster crowd. And I think that's how a lot of people percieve LJ - as a site for the spewing of teen angst and copied-and-pasted IM conversations between boyfriends and girlfriends.

Certainly, embarrassingly enough, that's what I used it for.

I always thought that what was interesting about LJ was how they handled their comments. The programmers keep blogs and post updates to your friends page.

If you're willing to dig, though, there's stuff for geeks too, like stats.

I had just read Caitlin's friend and then came to this:

The Internet, however, we tend to glance[1] at; our eyes skim over the screen in a freefall of vision until something interests us enough to pause the plummet momentarily. It is therefore a medium that requires readily accessible information; lean news, pared-down narratives.

in this essay. But if you look at even the most recent story on his blog, alchemy anyone hardly has the intention of being pared-down. Quite the opposite. Maybe that's why we're drawn to his stuff - because he's so thorough, so thought out, really embracing the medium as a way of storytelling.

I think it's really interesting (no surprise here) how Badger references Benjamin, writing,

Weblogs, it could be argued, help to re-establish the connection between image and place. When we look at a blog image we also look at what appears around it – the design of the blog itself, the text, the other images, the voice of the blogger. The context within which we view an image will always influence how we read it - we react one way to an image in a gallery and another way when we see it printed on a tea-towel. The weblog context is one of directness and immediacy and as such when we view images on weblogs with do so with an awareness of the date-stamp that accompanies them.

I wouldn't have thought that at all. I guess I would equate her reading of a blog to something like an art installation, which reintroduces a spatial context to the art piece.

More space:

Yet as McCloud points out with comics[14], it is the space between images where things start to happen, where the viewer constructs bridges between one image and the next, filling the gaps, making the connections.

The space between. These photoblogs are on the cold side of McLuhan's mediums. They require participation from the reader, creating a connection between reader and blogger.

I heartily recommend some Christmas music. Don't pay any attention to Pitchfork, they're pretentious bastards

check the stats.

So I went to Anonymizer's website to have a look around, and noticed that they misspelled "breach".

Frankly, I don't want to beat a dead horse with this anonynimity stuff - but I have been reading these websites and kind of laughing:

"Blogs are getting a lot of attention these days. You can no longer safely assume that people in your offline life won't find out about your blog, if you ever could. New RSS tools and services mean that it's even easier than ever search and aggregate blog entries. As long as you blog anonymously and in a work-safe way, what you say online is far less likely to come back to hurt you."

Maybe somebody can convince me otherwise, but if you want to blog personally and do it on the web, it's because you, like everybody, on some level is a voyeur and you want somebody to read you, for better or for worse, so don't pretend that you don't...

Okay, if you really want to write as some sort of therapy to keep all to yourself, then go back to the old days, and get a pen and a journal, not a website.

And if you want to blog to create change in the real world, then why not use your real name? The cyberworld and real world are not two entirely separate things - how can you try and bridge the gap in one way, by writing, and then hypocritically trying to, at the same time, conceal your identity so you're not accountable to yourself?

Avatars might be something different, I'll have to think about it. Avatars seem to be a way of creating an entire alternate personality, which can exist alongside your real self, rather than in place of it.

It took me awhile to think of (and find the the time to write) how I am related to information. I guess, the first thing that I should say, is that when thinking about this question, I often confused the word information with the word media. On one level, I guess they're synonyms, but on another, media trafficks information - it is the framework by which information is disseminated.

And media and information have infiltrated every part of our lives. Maybe it's the combination of this class and a class on media philosophy, but I've been left in the lurch. See, I love media and information. I have a cell phone, and when someone calls me in class, I won't answer, but I sure as hell pull the thing out of my pocket to see who is calling me. I can't be in my room 2 seconds without having my computer on. I have an iPod, and I walk across campus with music blasting in my ears. I have more than one email address. I have a blog, lots of books, my homepage is Google News, it has personal settings, and I frequently stop reading to see if it's changed. (Facebook, too). I don't watch TV, but I've managed to become addicted to Lost on DVD, a show that has to deal a lot with the question of what is real, and what is not, and what frameworks or systems structure our lives.

But I'm also very skeptical, and I'm afraid of how this increasingly speedy culture of information is affecting our personal relationships. I don't want to be living in a matrix. And for that, I hate myself a little bit every time I can't resist putting headphones in my ears to walk somewhere, or get frustrated everytime the internet cuts out on me and I can' t be on instant messenger.

My description of the bloggers in class will be forthcoming...but I'd like to say a couple things in general. First, on the fact that we refer to them as bloggers - we had a hard time adjusting to their "real" names - this is purely speculative and theoretical, but where DO they exist? For us, at least, their existence was purely as information, as an electronic media. They were not people, but they were their blogs. Look at Alden, for example: With a Longfellow Beard like he had just come out of a solitary time in the woods (or the wilderness of the electronic world), and wearing a shirt on which was stitched the word "Blogger" where a nametag would normally go. When he first visited class, I wasn't there, but I read about how he himself was like a blog...what came first, the blog or the brain?

Why were we so freaked out when Jason Scott showed up? Because we, foolishly could not reconcile the hyperreal with the real.

Alden, I'm sure you and other people who were in our class will read this - and I don't intend to criticize you or your fellow bloggers, marginalize you, or discredit the things you do do, working for the Dean campaign, or in the case of Spazeboy, following politicians around with cameras and being a full-time student. These are just musings, more about our perceptions of existence, not existence itself.

I'd like to direct everybody who hasn't been there already to head on over to Caitlin's blog and check out this post about romanticism and blogging.

One thing that we were talking about after class, as I made the trek over to the Tripod office to get my picture taken for an article, was the idea of the coffee shop we were talking about. Has the coffee shop been reinvented by the internet, or has it been destroyed by the internet?

One thing that immediately occurred to me was the origination of the coffee shop, which happened during the Enlightenment. All of a sudden, there was a venue for thinkers like Sam Johnson, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Dafoe to get together (well, not that group exactly, but people like them), toss ideas off of each other, go back to their flats, write about it, and then workshop that work.

I think that some people think that blogs can do away with the coffee shop, but blogging is only part of the thinking process, and can be no stand-in for face to face, personal interaction.