One thing guaranteed to make you feel old is discovering something “everyone else is doing��? that not only are you not doing, but that you have no interest in doing. One of these things for me is the MySpace phenomenon that’s been sweeping the country. To be honest I’m used to this happening with music (most new music simply makes me want to listen to old music), but the idea of tech trends passing me by is a relatively new one for me. I’ve known about MySpace for a couple of years now — it’s a site where people post pictures and do online networking and collect icons of people like we used to collect scratch-and-sniff stickers back in the early 80’s (don’t say you didn’t). What I’d never understood until now was the appeal of the site.

I remember the same thing happening shortly after the initial web boom (1994, for me). Back then websites were coded by hand, using notepad (you whippersnappers), and for a long time only the computer-savvy had websites. This changed with the arrival of AOL. Suddenly, anyone with an AOL account and a mouse could cobble a website together by simply click-click-clicking their way through a few standard templates. Geocities later did the same thing, for free. Overnight the web became flooded with millions of homepages.

Time went on and blah blah blah … I set up my own website several years ago, first using free web forwarders to point people to a web server located at my house and later using a real hosting company and a real domain (robohara.com). When brainstorming domain names I went with my real name, simply so I could be easily found by anyone wishing to do so. Then I went to work making the site my own. The most recent addition to my site is the installation of WordPress to make daily entries easier, but there have been years worth of implemented ideas that have come and gone. And despite all the work that’s gone into my site, at the end of the day there’s no guarantee that anyone will ever FIND it!

But MySpace makes all that easier. Once again, the ability to create a website with no HTML/coding knowledge has opened the floodgates and allowed millions of people to set up their own little online websites. It’s not a bad thing; in fact, the site’s established user base makes it easy to find people — and more importantly, at least to me, it makes it easier to be found. It also helps non-technical people find each other — not everyone I know/knew is/was a computer dork.

What does this mean to you, faithful reader? Well, pretty much nothing. My blog entries will now be duplicated to my MySpace blog as well, so wherever you’re reading this message, just keep coming back here. Along with robohara.com I also copy/paste these entries to LiveJournal, Digital Press, and now MySpace. Maximum exposure, yo.

We will now return to our regularly scheduled program already in progress.

If you want to find people you used to know, whether from high school, college, or just as friends, online people search engines can be of help to you. On a similar note you can also do an online background check on people if it would be important, such as running a background check on a new babysitter, just in case.