Monday, October 30, 2006

Is the digital herd tiring of the predators?

The Sunday Washington Post had an interesting article about MySpace, "In Teens' Web World, MySpace Is So Last Year - Social Sites Find Fickle Audience."

The writer interviewed teenagers regarding their views on MySpace and other social networking sites, the bottom line is that they are leaving MySpace.

In a previous post I wrote about the digital herd and how important it is to keep your grass fresh as well as how easy it is for a stampede to occur. The Post article has some great data on the rise and fall of the MySpace's predecessors.

Why are some people leaving now?

"The high school English class cites several reasons for backing off of MySpace: Creepy people proposition them. Teachers and parents monitor
them. New, more alluring free services comes along, so they collectively jump
ship"


My wife and I recently attended a wedding and spent some time in the airport with the brother of the bride who is a high school teacher. I asked about MySpace, which brought on a smirk. Apparently a bunch of kids posted some photos from a party they had which involved some illegal activities for all to see. Sure enough someone saw them and they got in trouble.

Creepy people, what to do with them? Dateline regularly has shows where they lure child predators into stings at homes. Where do they meet these people? Online. It's a scary thought for parents. At least some kids are aware of the creeps and are voting with their feet. In the past I mentioned of keeping your pasture as green and tasty as possible, this article has caused me to add one more factor. The predator, the predator prays on the heard while it's grazing. Maybe there's a fence that keeps them out or maybe there's ranchers hunting the predators. Looks like there might be too many predators for the digital herd at MySpace.

The question is:

Will the digital herd stampede to Facebook?

Sunday, October 29, 2006

More Pig Roast Pictures

Here are some more pictures - for some reason Blogger was not publishing more than five photos per post.




Pictures from the pig roast

I'm on a roll today, in a previous post I promised video and pictures from a family pig roast. While I haven't gotten the video piece done, I did upload some photos to the new AOL Pictures site. I've had trouble loading pictures to Blogger and AOL Pictures works great for hosting my pictures.

The spit turning mechanism:











Here are the two pigs on the spit cooking:










Carving up the pigs:

Replacing my rowhouse staircase (6 of 6) - Finished Finally

I finally finished the staircase I have been blogging about in the past. They've been done for some time and people have asked to see the final product.

It's also amazing how many times my posts have been found by people searching on Google about replacing stairs.

To see the rest of the staircase posts - click here



Hiking in Navy Road Park in Montauk

I haven't posted in quite sometime, it's been almost a month. Part of the month my wife and I were in Italy for ten days enjoying some time off the net.

After some torential rain yesterday myself, my wife, my brother-in-law, my future sister-in-law, and a friend and her dog went for a morning hike out at Navy Road Park in Montauk, NY.

Included some pictures below, the wind was howling.

Sunday, October 01, 2006