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February 6, 2008

I've Suddenly Realized I'm All Over the Internet World, and I Don't Know Why.

By: The Dude on the Right
The Super Bowl is over and we found out that Bill Belichick must have had an important meeting to get to at the end of the game.  Super Tuesday is over, and I feel bad for my mom because Ohio seems to be a pivotal state again in a Presidential election and that means she will be bombarded with ads for both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  I also read they are even planning to hold a debate in The Buckeye State - lucky O. Hi. O.  And speaking of ads, one of the latest iPhone ads touts the ability of using your iPhone with Facebook.  I would like to admit that the ad enticed me to set up a Facebook identity, but I actually set one up over the weekend, before the ad ran -

And I don't know why.

I say "I don't know why" mostly because I should just use this website to say anything I have to say, but suddenly I have found that I have a presence in multiple locations in the internet world, and maybe it's starting to get out of control.

Early on I was able to give myself the same name on a variety of IM sites, places like AOL, Yahoo!, Google, Messenger, and Skype, hoping to, I don't know, instant message people, but then I found that I rarely did, even when my "buddies" were online.  Now I just check the sites every month or so to keep them active, but I'm still hoping to utilize the "talk" feature of one of them to let you, if you listen to my podcast, actually "call" in during a podcast recording (let me know if you might be interested in being a part of a future podcast).

I'm also a member of a music message board that is very informative, and I love to read, but I rarely post because by the time I read something and have an opinion about it, someone has already posted the same opinion I have (and I hate to be a "Me, too!" kind of poster), or worse, someone misunderstands what I was trying to say, posts that I am scum, and I don't have time to get in a message board shouting match trying to explain my point of view.

I have a MySpace page that I try to blog about things I don't think entertainment readers care about, mostly about my struggles with losing weight, and every now and then throw a comment to my sister, niece, or nephew, but in the land of MySpace I only have 85 friends, and lately the only friend requests I get are to be the friend of some hot chick trying to get me to join her web site where I can only assume she gets naked if I give her my credit card number.

We, meaning the Entertainment Ave! website, have a presence in Second Life, a virtual world that has recently been rocked with a bank scandal (it can even happen in the virtual world), and at the time when I bought some virtual land and built a couple of virtual buildings, I had plans on how to use it, namely as a gathering place for people to talk about concerts, movies, and TV, complete with a virtual bar called Squirrelly Georges.  I actually have two names in Second Life, one for business (DudeOnRight Mannonen) and one for fun (Drewman Zapedzki, and not that kind of fun, even though you can have sex in the virtual world), but sadly I haven't been building much there lately though I'm hoping to change that now that I have digital versions of all of my concert photos (more on that in a later blog).

I also have a LinkedIn account which has actually helped me re-connect with some college friends, and I'm included in an internet social site for the fraternity I am member of, Theta Xi.  I was a member of a Yahoo! Group for the those from the class of 1985 of Lorain Catholic High School, but I opted out of that when one of my classmates decided that every day was a day to post about his political beliefs.  I'm tempted to rejoin just to see if he has toned things down a bit on his postings.  I also have a Classmates account, though I haven't visited that site in over a year because I don't want to spend the few bucks to get "better info" on old classmates, although, sometimes, I am tempted to see where an old girlfriend might be.

And if that isn't enough of an internet presence, now that I'm done with digitizing my concert photos, I've been thinking about setting up a Flickr account as I digitize the rest of the photos I have, many of which will deal with photos from college, photos from high school, photos I took for the hell of it, and photos of days before I was born so that relatives and friends around the world could see them.  The monkey-wrench thrown into this, though, is what the hell would I do with that account in the end, and now that Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo!, do I want Microsoft, somehow, in charge of my pictures?

And don't get me started on the various RSS feeds I read.

If that isn't enough more, now that I'm a member of Facebook I'm not really sure what to do there, either, or whom I should poke (you can do that on Facebook, but do I really want to "poke" people?).  Maybe it's just that I want to be the coolest 40 year old with a presence all over the world, or at least through the internet, but the crappy part is that most of the 40ish year old friends I would like to re-connect with, well, they don't seem to be as cool as I am and don't have accounts on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Second Life, various IM sites, or the world.

Maybe I should just Google them, or get younger friends. 

That's it for this one!  I'm The Dude on the Right!!  L8R!!!

Posted by Rightdude at 7:31 PM | Comments (0)