Embracing the Stalker Within

The more information I dredge up about the internet and its cornucopia of tools and applications, the more I believe the concept of privacy has ceased to exist. The web is no longer safe. I have discovered social bookmarking sites.

It makes me wonder about the consequences of my actions. What if I attempt to privately bookmark a page and I accidently make it public? I’d be completely exposed. The entire world could find out about my fascination with this video. (Ten points for Curious George, twenty negative points for Jack Johnsuck.) I would lose my street cred in an instant. It would be like catching The Game at a Hannah Montana concert.

But like most slightly depressing ideas, these stalker sites have a plus side. Because along with social bookmarking sites, I have also discovered (drum roll, please) RSS FEEDS. And, with the help of an ungodly tech-savvy person, I’ve discovered that combining the two saves me a ton of research.

My new best friend is Miguel Caetano. He doesn’t know I exist yet; in fact, his website is entirely in Portuguese (I think). But thanks to the combined efforts of del.icio.us and pageflakes, he has already directed me towards several glorious pages that will help me save the music industry. Alright, maybe they’ll just save my blog, but that’s a noble cause too, because someday my blog will help save the industry.

Miguel has a del.icio.us page where all his bookmarks are visible to anyone with a del.icio.us account. As of 24 hours ago, that includes me, too. He has thousands of sites bookmarked on del.icio.us, and adds several more daily. For those of you who know what “bundles” are, he only has one, and it only has one tag in it, which makes getting through his many topics a bit more difficult. There is one tag on fascism, and there are 1,566 tags on music, with hundreds of tags on everything from direito to Web 2.0 in between the two.

The only thing Miguel is consistent about is that he always writes a description of the webpage. Sometimes it is the first sentence of the page, and sometimes it is his own summary. Sometimes it is in English, sometimes, Italian. I would love to know exactly how many languages Mr. Caetano is fluent in. Here is one example:

If society members are to consider if there were ‘another way’, an intuitive response might be to ask if Societies could and should pursue equity relationships with nascent firms.

I found a ton of pages through Miguel that I will be checking up on again, but the one that stood out from the rest was Rolling Stone. “Rolling Stone?!” I can taste the indie faction of my legions of readers seething with betrayal. “How can you use them for your blog?” I have to admit, going to the suits for information had never crossed my mind. Why would I want to go to a corporate magazine for information I can get elsewhere? However, I am a staunch advocate of getting every viewpoint, even if said viewpoint is probably getting paid off to only print certain stories.

So, dear readers, congratulate me for trying to stay unbiased, do not shun me for selling out. In fact, I make no money from this, so selling out is literally impossible. Check out Miguel’s page; check out Rolling Stone’s blogs; I am sick and tired of the internet and I am going to go sit on my porch and pretend there are stars upon which to gaze in the smoggy skies of South Central.