Steve Irwin ate my ranking

It’s a bit of a problem for someone like my mate who occaisionally makes the mistake of taking himself seriously when it turns out that the most important thing to happen in the world is not one of the following:

• the announcement by the Sudanese government that they don’t think they’re killing enough black people in Darfur, and could the peace-keepers please leave?
• the ongoing efforts of a bunch of borderline psychopaths in Iran to nuke us
• the slow slide of Afghanistan into anarchy.

Nope, in fact, the story that everyone is talking about is that the crocodile hunter managed to listen to Aqua Marina once too often and got himself killed. By, in fairness, a seven-foot long member of the shark family with a poisonous tail and bad attitude. My mate wouldn’t be too fussed under most circumstances. After all, as campaigning conservationists go, he’s a damn sight more interesting than most you come across (take a bow, Albert Gore).

Only Steve Irwin’s dad, Bob, managed to describe his son as his best mate. e.g. “I’ve lost my best mate.” says Dad. You see what happened there? After all the effort of coming up with a decent internet identity. my mate finds that, like it or not, his search rankings can still be destroyed by an off-hand remark from the relative of a dead TV celebrity.

If you’re thinking this is petty and irrelevant, you’d be right. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

UPDATE: Having posted this article, google appears to have decided that blogging about Steve Irwin is enough to knock My Mate Says back up to the top.

Another day, another social networking site

In the future, you will find your life partner on google. Searches like

male, 27, 5′10, ten miles of EC1, genuine, chinese food, leather

will actually find you a soulmate, rather than the soc.culture.bulgaria frequently asked questions list.* Until that point, we have social networking sites, which range from the incompetent (can anyone use LinkedIn?) to the ridiculous (MySpace, natch). So, you spend half an hour filling in details on yet another site, which looks increasing like a psychoanalysis session…

Q: What did you learn from past relationships?
A: That there’s no good answers to some questions.

(My mate challenges you to come up with a better answer.)

So, you’ve now filled in your details on LinkedIn (if you can), Orkut (or is it Ortak?), MySpace (because all the kidz are doing it), Friendster, TheTribe and all of a sudden you realise: you have more social networking sites than friends. My mate reckons you’re more likely to make real friends playing video games on your Xbox than browsing MySpace

Having written this, it was rather disappointing to discover someone else had already said it better. If you want an intelligent article on the subject, you could do worse than reading Autistic Social Software.

*My mate assures you that this is really what happens. He was also curious to find out that there were in fact questions asked frequently about bulgarian society and culture.