Orcmid's Lair: The Rise of Anti-Social Networking

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Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton Archives Atom Feed Associated Blogs Edge City Numbering Peano Praxis101 Prof. von Clueless in the Blunder Dome Recent Items From Data Hoarding to Information Sharing Foretelling Our Technological Decline & Fall? Situated in CyberSpace: orcmid, Scoble, and those other guys. Blog, Wiki? WIki, Blog? Oh what to do! The Long Tail Meme Goodbye, "Pre-Approved Offer" Open Source: Taking Food from the Mouths of Capitalist Babies? Scoble Links: Overwhelm of the Solitary Connector Don Knuth on Science as Art and Scholarship as Community Effort Agreeing While Disagreeing	2005-04-14 The Rise of Anti-Social Networking FindTheDirt.com -> Search Requests. I received the most peculiar e-mail notice at the end of January. My spam filter caught it and, because the subject was so odd, I looked at its headers for signs of legitimacy. Although the site names were peculiar, there was not the usual pile-up of faked information and I gave the message a look. The note, from "findthedirt.com" says there are people who are asking for information about me (or whoever is known by my favorite e-mail address) and others are responding. I am invited to find out what the people who asked found out about me, for a small subscription fee. Why would I do that? Why? People talk about each other all the time. People gossip about other people. Most of what is said we don't know about, and we mostly don't even know about the conversation, for Pete's sake. So, as an individual, why would I want to know what that blather is, especially if it wasn't something that anyone thought important enought to contact me about? They've got my e-mail address, after all. Heck, look at all the people who look at my credit records and send me preapproved offers on a near-daily basis. This is not like PubSub or a referrer log (something I don't spend too much time on either), where there is a public connection and I might want to engage with it in some way. This is something else. I would have put it in the "ick" category except I find it more amusing and ridiculous than icky. The site is done up really nice, with SSL and everything. I can't imagine how the business model will work. In the world I live in, this simply makes no sense. I am not going to think about it any more, and I can destroy the e-mail now that I have chuckled with you about it. Now, you didn't go and search for your own e-mail address, did you? Feels weird? Consider that it is only because you now know about it, not that there is anything new (except maybe a scam) in reality. Aren't we funny? posted by orcmid at 4/14/2005 12:06:00 AM *Comments:* Dude I know this is OT, but I had to tell you how much I appreciate your comment on that insipid, pathetic Talking Moose blog crap. Do you see what is going on? This junk is anti-blogging, it is the doom of the blogosphere. When are we going to wake up and attack this horrid perversion of Sincerity, Online Community, Authenticity, Honesty, Credibility. That blog made you "feel dirty."?? I had the same feeling, but couldn't articulate it. What caused that creepy retarded brain death feeling? It was...almost...satanic...or something. And I don't mean to be religious or fanatically over reacting. Y'know? Something so dumbed down it was unclean, evil. I've never felt that way. I've never been to any porn site. This was dirty in a...dumbed down way. I just cannot capture the essence like you did so brilliantly. I'm a blogspot blogger. You're family! Drop by Vaspers the Grate. Visit BLOGthenticity: http://blogthenticity.com You should like both a lot. I hope. # posted by Steven Streight: 12:36 AM Steven is talking about comments posted on "The Red Couch" concerning a blog that is authored by a fictional moose. I'm not so charged up about it as Steven. I also don't have as much skin in the bizblog game and I hope that I was successful in presenting my personal reaction without generalizing beyond my own experience. The Talking Moose is still being developed, so I don't know what changes these early reactions will lead to, or not. PS: My favorite (i.e., only) baseball cap is autographed by a talking antlerhead and I treasure it. But I also know it was a person in an animal suit serving as a baseball-team mascot. Wanna play guess the team? # posted by orcmid: 1:26 AM I would have given the mascot's name but I couldn't remember it at once and I wasn't going to go look at the hat. But I had pie of that kind on Easter Sunday, and when I told Vicki that Safeway has some fresh in the produce section, I thought she was going to leave the dinner table right then and go shopping. But if you guess the team, you probably know the mascot's name. # posted by orcmid: 1:34 AM Post a Comment

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