I'm at one of our denominational retreats this week, enjoying a mostly refreshening week of conferences (perhaps exceptions will be detailed later...so far there is only one). Tonight, as I am wont to do from time to time, I checked my referrer logs to see whose been checking in.
It's mostly the usual gang of suspects....and yes, I am convicted that I need to finish my curriculum rant that I referenced over at Christopher's and said would be published here. I've got it mostly done, but then I had to get in the car and go across the country, and it's not quite done. So I'm sorry for that, but I'll hopefully have it soon.
Anyway, I clicked on one link that seems innocuous enough, but when I went to see if it was a new blog, it came up as blocked for the P-rhymes-with-thorn. So I'm bummed about that...because I doubt that someone came from an actual bad site to mine,* but that it was probably identified as a site according to key words, and now i'm paranoid that the baptist blackcoats will knock on my door at midnight and escort me to the freeway.
Not really...I'm told the baptist blackcoats don't exist...no matter what I think I may have just seen lurking in the shadows.
I also read in the news that myspace has deleted almost 30K profiles because they were discovered to be sex offenders. I wanted to go to my page and confirm that all my friends are still there, but myspace is also blocked from here, citing adult content. Great...a double alert coming from my IP Address. The Flo Mo video below won't even play...I guess I'll just continue my search on the bloody battles of the samurai and see if I can't start a three-alarm panic.
Oh, by the way, I'm not worried about any of my friends being sex offenders. However, I'm continually surprised by who turns out to be. Two different guys from high school (both a few years older) showed up on one of those watchdog sites.
And this is why I am advocate for some sort of age verification system for all social network sites. It is kind of a necessary frustration...but it turns out to be a strength for a site like facebook and a weakness of myspace, in that identities and relationships are protected from lurkers, stalkers, and criminals on the former and available at the latter.
*by the by (again), I took an online quiz recently that rated this blog PG-13 because I talk about things like sexual purity, death, and violence. So there you go...the beauty of keywords. This particular entry is problably setting off a siren somewhere on this parenthetical alone.