MySpace: Music and Marines

Hi folks -- sorry I missed yesterday; I'm still untangling from a bunch
of unfinished stuff from last week.

I've got a bunch
of potential blog entries that are getting dangerously close to their
"Blog By" expiration date; here are two from last week about our
favorite outrageously popular social network/whipping boy, MySpace (unrelated to their
downtime yesterday due to the power
outages in California):

The first is a
MySpace-themed
music video on social video sharing site
YouTube; it's from hip-hop band Gym Class
Hereoes, and I'm using the embedded YouTube video player
to show it below:



The video takes the standard MySpace
behaviors and brings them into the physical world -- if you're familiar
with MySpace and their friend approval process and the MySpace profile
cliches and stereotypes, it's pretty funny. Plus, there's a happy
ending.

Of course, the band has a MySpace --
right now, they have, oh, 98,640 friends.

In other
MySpace news, there was an AP story about how the Marine
Corps also has a MySpace, to help them reach out to young
people who are potential recruits.

The article
mentions that previously, folks (such as the Army, which has its own free video game
as a recruiting tool) had been hesitant to set up a presence on
MySpace, because of all the well-publicized accounts of various crimes
and shenanigans involving the social network, but it seems like it's
too juicy of an opportunity for them to resist.

So
here's the Marine
MySpace if you want to check it
out.

[Reminder: If you want to embed video from YouTube or UnCut Video, both of these are beta features; if all goes well, we should be installing them to production this week. In the meantime, if you want to play around, here's Editor Jeff's entry on how to embed YouTube video; you follow similar procedures with UnCut Video -- just click "Snag an Embeddable Player" and copy that code. We'll have full instructions after the successful launch.]

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: myspace, marines