Wheat-dogg's World

Today’s favorite personal music device is the iPod, an engineering marvel that has made Apple a ton of money. Back in the day, though, the wonder device was the pocket transistor radio.

My father ran a TV-radio repair business, and for my 6th birthday (not sure really) I got a Toshiba transistor radio, similar to the one pictured here.

To a six-year-old, this item was The Coolest Thing, since I could now listen to the radio — my radio — pretty much wherever I liked. The design of the unit was futuristic (well, for 1962, anyway) and even now has a certain retro appeal. It was simple to operate. A dial to turn it on and adjust the volume. Another to tune it. The tuning dial had only the first digit of the AM frequencies, using a “font” strikingly similar to that used in my father’s ’51 Hudson’s speedometer and clock dials. Pinpointing any particular frequency was an art, requiring patience and a steady hand, but in the NYC area, signal strength was seldom an issue.

With the radio came a leather cover and an earphone. The earphone was too big for my child-sized ear, so I never used it. I’m not sure how long I had this radio, or how long I used it. Eventually, FM radio became more appealing, but I never acquired an FM set with the same size and panache of the Toshiba.

So, if I have a MySpace page, it seems only natural that I join the Facebook crowd, too. And in just a short few days, I have concluded all on my own that Facebook is light years ahead of MySpace in terms of form and function.

Form: None of the MySpace DIY webpage formatting that creates graphic abominations. True, Facebook pages are boringly identical in layout, but you CAN READ THEM! SInce they are easily read and navigated, it seems to be a lot easier to find people and for them to find you in Facebook than MySpace.

Function: Aside from the clear navigational aids, I was most impressed by Facebook’s “import a blog” feature, which I immediately enabled on my page there. It’s not a particularly complex feature, so I wonder why MySpace can’t do it, too. Blogs have feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.), so you give Facebook your feed URL and you get to post in two places at once. Result: wider audience and more traffic to your site (perhaps).

That being said, I feel like somewhat of an interloper on both sites. The vast majority of Facebook and MySpace users are less than half my age! So I definitely stand out in those friends lists. (Actually, on MySpace, Sir Sean Connery is standing in for me. ) Then there is the fact that many of my students use either or both sites, which is probably kind of weird from both our perspectives. People tend to be remarkably frank on these sites, so I see a side of my students (and former students) that I don’t usually see at school. My own sites are kind of bare right now, so the sharing is a tad lopsided. Give me some time, kids!

Yes, dear readers, ’tis true. I have joined the MySpace generation, after months of excoriating it as a graphic trainwreck and web navigation disaster. I have a modest, graphically simple (thank you) MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/wheatdogg. Why? Because, like nature, I abhor a vacuum.

Some months ago, while writing about Brittany McComb, the Nevada valedictorian whose overly Christian message alarmed school officials, I tried to contact her. McComb’s only presence on the internet was her MySpace page, and you cannot contact a MySpacer without having a MySpace account yourself. She never replied to my questions, but there I was, stuck with a MySpace page with nothing on it. Rather than request the sitemasters to delete it, I decided to use it as a way to direct people to this, my real blog.

In short order, I joined a couple of groups, including that of the high school where I teach. Before long, students got wind of it. Most were amazed, or at least amused, but I overheard one say to a friend that I was still using the default MySpace layout. Youch! My wounded web developer pride forced me to explore more tasteful (read, less busy and confusing) MySpace layouts. The examples I have seen (some used by my students, in fact) are worse than the default, with backgrounds that hurt your eyes, color schemes that make it hard to read the text, and layouts that spill off the screen. In other words, they suck!