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With the recent plague of news articles about sexual predators on MySpace it’s easy to place the blame on dirty old men.
The growing American anti-personal-responsibility trend makes it even easier to point the finger. I’ll assume we’re all tired of hearing about the 14 year old who met a 19 year old, had sex, and then sued MySpace for failing to protect her right?
In fact, some have even gone so far as to characterize MySpace as a bunch of hot teens looking for a hookup, predators looking for hot teens, and cops pretending to be hot teens to look for predators.
Then there’s the predators pretending to be hot teens to look for hot cops pretending to be hot teens to look for predators pretending to be hot teens.
You might want to re-read that. You might not get it now, but you’ll be in bed later and be like “ahh.. haha good one.”
Anyway, not a day goes by anymore where I don’t read a news article about MySpace and predators, and part of me seems to think we’re ignoring the real problem.
What about the kids who think it’s cool to play games of “Bait the Pedophile”? What about the kids who knowingly seek out and meet people twice their age, then give them their phone number, and sometimes go as far as flying to another country to meet them?
When did it become socially acceptable for a 16 year old girl to be sexually interested in a 40 year old man but not the other way around. If you ask me, there’s something wrong with both parties involved.
So how do we fix MySpace? Yeah I know we could do without the background music, animated gifs, backgrounds colors that match the text, horizontal scrolling, and other 1996 style issues, but those aren’t really hurting anybody.
I say it’s time we build personal responsibility into MySpace. Currently, if Joe TeenRaper wants to find a “hot teen hookup”, he searches for a profile and makes a friend request.
For some extremely dumb reason that can only be comprehended by the brilliant “I know what I’m doing” 14 year old mind these girls actually accept the request. Why? Who knows, but that’s the problem right there.
No matter where you go in life, be it MySpace, the mall, or even your church picnic, there are going to be older men who prey on younger girls. I don’t even want to get into the causes of that; they’re irrelevant.
So why not cut it off before at the . MySpace is currently planning on not allowing anybody over 18 to contact anybody under 16 unless they know the person’s full name or email address, but come on, how hard is that? That’s not going to stop anybody.
Why not do it in reverse? Why not prevent anybody over 16 from requesting any friends under 16? Make the minor initiate the friend request.
This helps in 2 ways:
1.) It makes the minors actually search out the older men if they want to be friends, not the other way around.
2.) It puts the responsibility and blame on the shoulders of the minor. Now, it’s their own damn fault if something happens. They shouldn’t be looking for older men in the first place.
Granted it doesn’t stop old men from creating fake profiles, but if you look at the news most of the cases don’t involve fake profiles. That’s right, in most of the cases the girls knew the guy’s age and still went to meet him.
It’s time we hold teens (and their parents) responsible for their own actions. Can you really blame the shark if you jump into it’s tank wearing a brand new fish gut swimsuit?
Let’s shift the burden of initiation onto the minor, hopefully it’ll stop us from having to read the same articles every day. I’m getting tired of them, aren’t you?
January 1st, 2005
Ok, Spamming my Free Text Message site with VOTE to the 1-800 numbers on Idol, will only result in annoying me and getting your IP baninated. I needed to remove about 7 or 8 spammers… one person even sent 740 (failed) messages trying to vote for Taylor. (all the spammers were trying to vote for Taylor)
Also, unless his cell phone is an 866 number, he didn’t get your comments. Sorry.
Oh yeah, Read This Article
Update on the Bin Laden Search
Washington seems to be limiting their Search to only Google… Guys, I don’t think you’re going to find him there…. Try MSN… there’s no age filter there..
January 1st, 2005
For the first time ever, both Katherine McPhee AND Taylor Hicks have won American Idol.
At least that’s what Canada.com says.
Note to web developers: It’s ok to pre write your stories, just don’t put them live.
January 1st, 2005
Belle Tire is running their commercials offering nitrogen in tires.
A lot of people are skeptical as to the benefits, so I offer you this:
NitroNize Your Tires – FAQ This answers the common questions and even tells you how much you could save on gas mileage.
Do the research and decide for yourself.
January 1st, 2005
Don’t Google Image search at work. Even if it’s for something harmless like Aeon Chair.. you never know what you’re going to find. Of course, turning safe search on might have fixed that… owell now I know.
Also.. don’t try playing hockey with a broken wrist.. it’s hard enough to type like this.. the cast randomly hits spacebar for me, and it hurts to type the letters m n y h p o and any numbers.
January 1st, 2005
I really didn’t want this to turn into an SEO blog, but it’s fun to talk about, and people seem to like to discuss it.
Today I want to tell you a simple truth that many webmasters and business owners can’t grasp: Your Site Sucks
Well ok it doesn’t suck, but it’s not as good as you think it is. One of the hardest things to do in SEO is to look at your site from the perspective of a searcher. That’s why it’s a great idea to hire a 3rd party company, they’re not attached to your site in any way; they have no feelings to hurt.
I wanted to talk about a company who fired me after I said I couldn’t make their “contact us” page rank for a software related term, but I feel it’d be better if I use a fictional example.
John owns a chimney sweeping company, and he’s really frustrated that he can’t get on the front page of Google for “chimney sweeping”.
John’s done his SEO, he’s traded links, got listed in all the good directories, put out press releases, wrote articles, has a blog and a newsletter, updates his content frequently, and has a good pagerank, and even an affiliate program, but he just can’t crack the top page of Google.
Eventually John gives up and buys adwords, then swears it’s a Google conspiracy to force him into buying adwords. He even makes a post on Matt Cutts blog accusing Google of unfailry not raking his “useful” site.
The problem here is that while John’s site IS useful, it’s NOT useful to somebody searching for “chimney sweeping”.
Let’s look at the top results, and we see this: National association of, how to, training school, job profile, and how to find a chimney sweep.
These are useful sites. Why? the term “chimney sweeping” implies that the searcher is looking for information about the topic, NOT a chimney sweeping company. If they were, they’d have searched for “chimney sweep boston” or “chimney sweeping company” etc etc. These are the terms John should focus on if he wants to show up on page 1.
Since John never did his research, and couldn’t look at his site from the perspective of a searcher, he wasted months optimizing for terms that he really shouldn’t be a top result for.
That’s what SEO is about. It’s not about tricking the search engines or writing code to make your site better than others. It’s about anticipating what somebody is searching for, and then building a site that is relevant to that search – from the searcher’s perspective.
January 1st, 2005
I was reading This Article and I realized that we as Americans just need to stop, forget about 9-11 and think back to the year 2000.
Got it? Remember it? Good. Now what do we want in the future? What type of world do we want to live in?
If I told you about a country in 2000 (before the sept 11 world trade center attacks) where the government monitored your phone calls, your internet access, your search history and library books, allowed people to go to jail without being charged, tortured prisoners of war, and started wars…
You’d be like “OMG, I’d hate to live there.” Right?
Well guess what, now you live there… and it’s only going to get worse in the future.
It’s serious America. Your dog died, you got over it. 9-11 happened, get over it. It’s time to move on and quit mourning. Lets decide what kind of country we want to live in.. I know nobody wanted this 6 years ago… why does 9-11 make it so much more different?
January 1st, 2005
I’m still waiting for Matt Cutts to confirm if this is a real bug or not, but I can’t find any other causes..
I think it has to do with the latest BigDaddy update and cache sharing. Here’s how that works:
When adsense visits your site, it caches it. When the search spider needs to visit your site, it says “oh, adsense was just there.. I’ll use that.” This is a great feature, as it saves both Google and webmasters bandwith.
Note, that using adsense does NOT get you indexed faster, it just stops the bot from making an unnecessary visit. But, I do think this is causing me to get indexed slower. Here’s what happened:
In April I bought a domain and put up a “coming soon” type message on it. I then created a subdirectory and started developing the site there. Security by obscurity right?
Anyway, I made a test.html page in the root directory a few days before going live. This test.html page linked to www.mydomain.com, and had adsense included on it.
I noticed after a few visits to my test page (121 actually), that ads were starting to get relevant. I verified this because I saw Googlebot had visited twice (Yahoobot has visited once too, as my alternate ads are set to yahoo)
I thought nothing of it, and switched the site live.
It’s important to realize that at this time, there were a total of 0 in-links to the site (in google, msn, yahoo, ask, etc), and the site had not been previously owned, nor submitted to any search engine.
But it was listed on Google’s cache. Not the test page, just the main index page, and it’s “coming soon” message.
How did that happen? Is it possible that the adsense spider searched other pages it found (to determine relevance), then cached them too? So when I submitted the domain to Google the next day, it grabbed that old adsense cache even though it technically didn’t exist anymore?
Ordinarily this wouldn’t be a problem, but another BigDaddy improvement was to not revisit spam sites as often. I can see how Google wouldn’t want to revisit a 4 word website, and so it’s been almost a month since the last googlebot visit (despite some fresh in links and a manual submission)
It looks like putting adsense on my page here actually hurt me.
The good news is, it’s an easy fix for Google. Don’t let the adsense bot make the first cache of a webpage. Or, if you do.. don’t let the search engine spider use the adsense cache if it’s the first time it found the URL from a different site, or from manual submission.
January 1st, 2005
Follow the Red Wings playoffs with me on my Red Wings Blog
January 1st, 2005
Imagine opening up your browser, typing in www.userfriendly.org to view your favorite comic, and getting this message:
We’re sorry, but this feature is only available to premium subscribers of Comcast Internet. Please click here to upgrade your subscription for only $9.95 / month.
You’d be pretty pissed off right? Well, this situation will become reality tomorrow.
Congress is expected to pass a bill tomorrow allowing the cable companies control over their networks.
You see, under the communications decency act of 1996, telephone companies couldn’t offer preferential treatment. They simply had to allow any bits on their networks to flow. That’s how the freedom of the internet came about, and it’s largely responsible for its rapid growth; not to mention allowing anybody with a laptop to start a website.
A recent ruling said that high speed lines don’t fall under this act, and that’s where the problems come in.
Cable companies already miss the point (see the old “google is using my pipes and not paying me” type articles), and you can expect them to miss the point even more so after the bill gets approved wednesday.
The internet as we know it is over. Expect the monopolistic cable companies to engage in any type of profiteering or anti-competitive practices they see fit. After wednesday, there’s nothing in place to stop them.
January 1st, 2005
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