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December 22, 2005
Mywar vs. Myspace
If you don't spend a lot of time online and you're over 17, you may not be familiar with Myspace, the Rupert-Murdoch-owned extravanganza that makes Web publishing available to everyone. Kinda like GeoCities, but different.
Now, I've never pretended that BunkoSquad was the pinnacle of human accomplishment on the Web. But as far as I can tell, the zeitgeist of Myspace is that any actual personal contribution (your own writing, your own pictures, any evidence of your own identity) seems to be unneccesary, if not actually verboten. It looks like the entire point of Myspace is to collect "friends" and throw a lot of crap up as if you're decorating your freshman dorm room.
Here's where I come in. When these kids have the entire Web to use to decorate their walls, and money's not an object, they're going to go a little nuts. And some of the pictures they chose to appropriate were mine.
Now we all know that hotlinking images is a bad idea for two reasons. One, it's a strain on the image host, but frankly, the extra traffic from Myspace isn't enough to sink my ship. But the second reason is that if the image owner (me) discovers that someone's doing this, they can switch out the images with something new. And so I did.
Unfortunately, one of my victims caught on pretty quick. They found a picture I took at the first night of legal gay marriages in Cambridge and posted it. The picture, of a guy holding a "Still Single" sign, was captioned "i'm sure that he will be a virgin for life". (Capital letters are frowned upon in Myspace.) I thought that was unfair to the guy, so I replaced him with an image of a fat kid about to destroy the world's largest burger. Unfortunately, the owner of the page (SAMSAMSAMSAMSAMSAMSAMSAM) realized my subterfuge and removed it.
Not so savvy were jeremye and vero, who chose independently to display an image from my movies section, without context. For that, I chose hetemeel.com's "HA! HA!" guy, the Internet gift that keeps on giving.
So the lessons here: Public schools should add basic Web skills to their stellar curricula, along with evolution, civics and practical sex education. And don't screw with someone who has a slight malicious streak and occasional spurts of free time.
Filed Under: The Internet Is Fun | Permanent Link, Comments (3) | Linking Blogs
Comments
As somebody who's also had some annoyances with MySpace of late (Ohio dweeb made up a bogus e-mail address on my server; all of a sudden I start getting mail for him - MySpace's initial answer was to tell me to log into the account and delete it), I sympathize. But if you have access to, um, .htaccess, there's some code to block hotlinking. I can send a sample to you if you want - came in handy when some pay-per-click scammer in China started hotlinking my site banner tens of thousands of times a day.
Posted by: adamg | December 22, 2005 02:49 PM
I don't need it yet - it's still at the low volume that makes it more amusing than annoying. But thanks for the tip in case it ever gets out of hand.
Posted by: michael | December 22, 2005 03:06 PM
My all-time favorite was when some loser on a forum stole, of all things, a photo I'd posted of clear-heeled, 3-steps-from-the-pole stripper shoes. I had some fun with that one...
Posted by: shannon | December 29, 2005 11:09 AM
