I keep poking around other blogs. I find it interesting to discover that I know people at those sites. I still don’t plan to switch from Xanga, though. Not because it’s the best weblog community ever, or that all my friends are here, or that they’ve won my loyalty, or I find the source code easy to hack, or anything like that. I just haven’t found anyplace that I like so much that I just gotta switch. Xanga’s not perfect, but it’ll do for now.
I also find the degree of information they want about their users to be likewise interesting. They swear up, down, and sideways that they won’t give your data to telemarketers, or to use it for their own marketing purposes, yet the stuff they want to know about your life and habits could put together a database that most marketers would give their left gonads to get. One wanted to know every last habit I had: the last 20 movies I had seen, books I had read, CDs I had bought; favorite music styles, clothing brands, food purchases, etc. All this ostensibly for the sake of people who logged on to my blog, so that they’d get to know me faster… and if I were shallow enough, I suppose they would get to know me faster.
But so would someone who is trying to sell me stuff. I don’t necessarily mind that a company wants to know what I like so that they can sell me stuff more efficiently; Amazon does it. So does Safeway and Starbucks, which is why they have their cards. What I mind are the people who try to sell me stuff in the mail, on the phone, through email or pop-up ads—you know, advertisers who inconvenience. If you have to go out of your way to make them go away, they inconvenience. I wish they’d test-market that, but that’s another rant.
Anyway… As I was saying, the stuff that they want to know is fairly superficial, but that’s likely also the result of marketing. Most of the people on these sites are teenagers and twentysomethings, many of whom don’t know who they are, and fill in those blanks with the media they consume.