{"id":601,"date":"2006-01-03T17:28:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-03T23:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/?p=601"},"modified":"2006-01-03T17:28:00","modified_gmt":"2006-01-03T23:28:00","slug":"this-weeks-column-the-myspace-bug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/this-weeks-column-the-myspace-bug\/","title":{"rendered":"This week’s column: The Myspace bug"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a confession to make — I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been bitten by the Myspace.com<\/A> bug.
\nI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not sure how I let it happen, but I let my guard down one night and then “Bam!” just like cooties I was overwhelmed.
\nI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve avoided the online networking service for the past year, telling myself I was too good for it.
\nI kept telling myself I already had a blog, or online journal, and I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need another thing to waste my time.
\nBut then one night, shortly after Christmas, I visited a friend\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s online profile and decided I was tired of being “out of the loop.”
\nMy friends were joining the service, that boasts itself as “a place for friends,” daily and I was being left out.
\nI usually like to be on the front lines of things and suddenly I found myself following the growing numbers of people who log in daily to share journals, pictures, music and information.
\nBut who needs Myspace? After all I was one of the first ones in my group of friends to get a “real blog” on blogger.com. Why couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t they just join my world instead of me joining theres?
\nSo while I had vowed to avoid the Myspace community for so long, I now find myself checking the site almost hourly to be sure I haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t missed someone wanting to be my friend, or a comment posted by “I’ll take the glazed with chocolate covering,” a Lancaster cop I met recently at Caf\u00c3\u00a9 Brazil in Dallas (yes, that is the name posted on her online profile).
\nSure Myspace sends e-mail updates to alert me when one of my friends have added comments or messages, but if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m lucky, I can beat my e-mail server and find comments and messages sooner than my e-mail client can notify me.
\nAnd if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m lucky I may get to read a journal entry from my buddy Brandon, who lives in Ohio and apparently hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t updated his journal since September 25, 1992.
\nSince joining Myspace after Christmas I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve accumulated 26 different friends — something Brandon says somehow validates our existence in the online world.
\nMost of my friends are from college but some are from my high school alma mater, and others have simply contacted me through networking groups, designed to join people with similar interests.
\nThe site is almost like a large “Six steps to Kevin Bacon.”
\nYour list of friends and network expands as you add more friends to your profile.
\nI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m roommates with “Mattchew”, who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s brothers with “All Things New”, who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s friends with Christian artists Michelle Tumes and Rebecca St. James, which makes me friends with Michelle Tumes and Rebecca St. James.
\nIf I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m lucky, one of my friends will give me true validation and put me on their list of Top 8 friends, showing people I really do exist.
\nMany are suggesting that an alternative community is developing within the boundaries of Myspace.
\nWith over 46-million users it is one of top 10 English websites in the world.
\nThe site and service was first founded in 2003 by Tom Anderson, the current president and Chris DeWolfe, the current CEO.
\nIn July 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, parent company of Fox Broadcasting, paid $580-million to buy out IntermixMedia, the former owners of the site.
\nWith so much attention given to the online community, companies and celebrities are quickly jumping on board.
\nMadonna, Green Day and other artists have their own profiles in the online community that are typically maintained by publicists or record labels, but are many times maintained by the artists themselves.
\nThere\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s even a growing number of politicians joining the community. Politicians wanting to gain as much exposure as possible are joining up and marketing their thoughts and campaigns to the growing number of users.
\nThe online Republican group has 27,100 members to date and the online Democratic group has 31382 members.
\nVictoria Bernal a community building associate with the Benton Foundation writes “creating a successful online community is one of the most sought after and elusive goals in a Web strategy.”
\nBernal said huge sums of money are spent to perfect online strategies to build community, customer relationships and loyal customers.
\nIn the non-profit community, clients, grantees and citizens take the roll of customer.
\n“The (non-profits) stakes are higher because usually the nonprofit\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s goal is to sell not a product, but a mission,” said Bernal. “In this context, an online community can be a powerful tool to bring constituents together to share their concern for an issue.”
\nNonprofits can use online communities to increase visibility about an issue of concern, mobilize concerned citizens to advocate a political support fundraising efforts by connecting donors and members, announce current events to the public and to recruit volunteers for the organization.
\nMany credit Howard Dean\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s early success in the 2004 Presidential Elections, with his ability to join people online behind his cause.
\nBut while Myspace works to improve community and networking, parents need to remember that the information their 14-year-old posts on their profile is available to all 46-million users with very little effort.
\nParents need to keep a constant watch on what information their children are posting online. Start your own profile and join your child\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s network of friends. Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t let them navigate online alone.
\nWell, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s it for this week, I believe “Dr Rosenrosen” has just updated his online journal. If I hurry I can be the first to comment on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a confession to make — I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been bitten by the Myspace.com bug. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not sure how I let it happen, but I let my guard down one night and then “Bam!” just like cooties I was overwhelmed. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve avoided the online networking service for the past year, telling myself I was too good … Continue reading This week’s column: The Myspace bug<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pEnSo-9H","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/84"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}