MySpace on My Mind

Hi folks -- this week's edition of satirical newspaper The Onion riffs on a story that was in the news last week about how popular social network/blog provider MySpace is taking steps to calm nervous parents (and legislators) who are worried about the shenanigans that kids are getting into on the site.

The Onion provides its usual, er, unique take on the subject, in the form of an easily digestible infographic:

Check it out.

In other MySpace news, Mike Davidson, one of the founders of social news site Newsvine, takes a look at what designers and other folks interested in CSS can do to hack MySpace layouts to make them less eye-bleedingly hideous ("Hack" is used in the traditional sense of the word, which means getting under the hood of something and tweaking it to do something the way you want it to work.)

There's a whole cottage industry around creating and selling customized MySpace layouts; some are great, some are okay, and some of them are really, really bad. 

Now, of course, that's just my opinion -- keep in mind that I'm a decade or two outside of the MySpace target demographic and ultimately, neither my nor anyone else's opinion matters when it comes to issues of taste -- only the opinion of the person whose blog it is matters.

Anyway, Mr. Davidson is trying to make it easier for people to muck around with CSS and their MySpace layouts to make elegant and useful layouts, so he's identified some of the "rules" that will help CSS folks write clean code that works.

(Incidentally, I found that link via Popurls.com, which is another one of those Web 2.0 sites; it cherry-picks the top articles of other social sharing and link sites -- in this case, the article came from social bookmark sharing site del.icio.us.)

For our part, in the coming weeks, we'll be talking about stuff that you'll be able to do to customize your own Journals layouts, without being a CSS guru.

There's also some other stuff that isn't really directly related to Journals that's pretty cool, but I can't talk about that right now.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: myspace, the onion