e*star LA

This has circulated on the web for awhile, but I was reminded of it recently with a couple events that have occurred–both web-related, but only one personal.

1) My departure from Xanga 3 months ago apparently left a void. Someone felt it amusing and/or vicarious to create a Xanga handle just like mine, but with one added “R”. He then proceeded to hack my neglected Xanga (which I left to create e*star LA) to falsely re-entitle it, then comment on other Xangas with idiotic one-worded comments as if they were my own.

I had flagged him to the Xanga authorities under “malicious impersonation” once despite his javascript URL redirect coding over a month ago, but this week a friend whose blog he had commented on under the fake handle informed me he was back. And so I returned to Xanga for one lone post with the “fake me’s” IP in-hand, and informed everyone who would read that lone post that the culprit shared an IP with someone they were all familiar with, at least on Xanga.

The true intention, I can’t even imagine nor will I ever find out; that is, nor do I care to.

2) Thanks to the folks over at 9rules, I learned about a rumor that News Corp. is considering swapping MySpace for a quarter stake in Yahoo! How crazy is that?

A deal would demonstrate a remarkably swift return on News Corp’s investment in MySpace, which it acquired for $580 million in summer 2005.

Yesterday Yahoo! was worth $37 billion. A quarter stake in an enlarged company would be worth $11.1 billion.

It is not clear whether Yahoo! was willing to accept the terms offered, even though it has been eager to break into social networking to catch up with Google. Yahoo! tried and failed to buy Facebook, the No 2 social networking site, for $1 billion last year.

My personal opinion is that, though it is certainly worth a lot of money, MySpace is not worth that much. Gah. I just can’t get over how sickly, gross and sproradically formatted the entire site looks. And yet, I still have an account, albeit privatized. It doesn’t define me, nor does it define a lot of people. But people from the past (good and bad) have been able to get in contact with me, because by having an account, I’ve basically claimed my tiny village in a major country that has made its stake on the online map. You can hate the country and hate everything it stands for, but you cannot deny it’s there.

Anyway, the Map of Online Communities (click to enlarge):

Where have you traveled? Where have you stayed? And where have you settled?

According to the compass, my online presence has migrated from a “focus on real life” (Xanga, as explained above) towards the “intellectual” (my own island of e*star LA inside The Blogipelago). Meh. My Flickr and Last.fm membership mark my stakes in the Sea of Culture and the Straits of Web2.0–and my homestay in The Blogipelago have allowed me to integrate these other things on the map. My obsession with Lolcats, which I’m aligning with the “anthropomorphic dragons,” have me flirting with the Ocean of Subculture. Although I do Reddit and Digg once in awhile, my del.icio.us is really my only participation in the Viral Straits. If you’re familiar with the community on Digg, who like to rule the site with a mass-minded, dumbed-down iron fist, you’ll know what they mean by the Bay of Trolls nearby.

I found it interesting that Classmates and Friendster, though decent, mid-sized countries, are a bit isolated from everyone else in the chilly, icy Northwest. Also interesting was the Bay of Angst nestled right inside “the country” of Xanga. Emos, much?

Your turn. Where you be?

Love,
*e