Web crawls

stalking through blogs
Friendster allows me to see who has viewed my profile; this feature enables a new manifestation of passive-aggressive flirting. If you or I don't have the guts to flirt outright with a message (an online message itself a rather weak-kneed approach), then view their profile--if they view you back, you may proceed to the online message. An ex boyfriend views my profile, and then I view his. And from there I am taken to his rather rudimentary corner of the web--a collection of family photos, an abandoned livejournal account that ends almost in mid-sentence. From there I am led to his myspace profile, and now I am stalking my exboyfriend through blogs. Myspace is the messier little brother to Friendster which has gone on to do better things. More popular with teens who are in love with neon and background wallpapers of heart-throbs. It is a minefield of midi songs and has recently been purchased by Fox because of its potential to launch a thousand musical careers. Fully adaptable, it turns kids into css butcherers. Through my exboyfriend's myspace page I find a link to another exboyfriend--of mine. I forget they are friends. I hesitate only a few moments before reading that blog as well. Back at the first exboyfriend's myspace blog, I read an entry where he discusses 'old flames' and mentions my name. I roll my eyes, though secretely pleased. But reading on, I come to realize its not me, but a third exboyfriend of mine the first exboyfriend is talking about--they dated each other when they were both done dating me. I begin to think off them as a little uncreative. Be my myspace friend.

whois searcher
There's a snide little bitchy gossiper out there named whois searcher. This person unveils the identities behind website owners or anonymous internet monikers and yet hides behind their own generic title. Like the anonymous little home wrecker who whispers something salacious in your ear at the cocktail party. A much lesser equivalent to the high-ranking government official or witness a. Whois searchers run reverse dns scans or ip searches on left-behind comments or page visits or website ownership and posts the information for everyone. Does it matter if local democratic party operative is behind local small beer gay porno site? In some cases the whois searcher has provided a valuable function (Jeff Ganon comes to mind) but then in the sake of fairness usually does not in turn hide their identity. I turn my nose up at you, whois searcher.

whois
Whois has become a new word for us, referring to the specific details that nail our ephemeral, mutable online apparitions in real, physical space. Whois refers to your online chat room boyfriend's real physical identity as a middle-aged woman in Hoboken.

bots
This website was so name partly because I have some good scruff going on and partly because I remain interested in bots...the little programs and apps we send out into the web to do things for us. Alert us when we have new email, monitor our ebay bidding wars, capture streaming video for our own personal use. Anyone who uses gay.com will have been chatted up by spam bot. One could think of google as a big giant bot made up of hundreds of servers, a grotesque but incredibly useful medusa of bots. Ikea has a bot that isn't good at answering your questions. Spammers use bots to read lines of code embedded in webpages looking for email addresses. A bot stands in for us, does things it would be too bring for us to do, like play chess against us. For a bot to be a bot, it must also not remain static, but move across a conceptual internet space. For example, FlashGot attaches to the firefox browser and investigates website hierarchies. Once a pattern is discerned in the numbering elements like directories or jpeg files or mp3 files, FlashGot spelunks through the webpage within specific parameters, delivering content scattered or hidden up to the surface, to one single place. Vacuums like Blue Crab are programs will vacuum up an entire website's contents for you, downloading everything seen or unseen to your desktop--html files, images, banners, forums.

pic collectors
People who set up fake but attractive postings on craigslist merely to collect photographs of real people are ruining it's potential to be a hot random sex hookup site. Apparently. The men seeking men section of the Twin Cities's craigslist community contains some rather dubious postings...here are some straight or bi college guys who are a pretty chill and laid back crew and get into circle jerks. Here is a bicurious twenty-one year old jock who is interested in trying new things. The collective craigslist men for men community deems these postings too good to be true. Why does a pic collector collect pics? Wouldn't it be easier to send out a bot or vacuum up a website? What do they do with the real and banal photos they are sent in good faith (or perhaps those are themselves fakes)?

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