This time last week, something on the order of 72 blogs apparently linked here; today, it’s 58.  (I’ve also dropped from a nice, solid rank of 36,000ish to well into the 45,000 territory.) Does Technorati know something I don’t know?  Am I losing my appeal?  Or has their database/algorithm/little magic box with hamsters inside gone wonky?  Or is the only problem here that I pay any attention to such things?

[UPDATE, like 30 seconds later:  Wait—now it’s 57 blogs, leading to a rank in the 46,000s.  Am I gradually disappearing, like in one of those time-travel movies where some paradox has just negated my existence entirely?]

So word is spreading throughout the blogosphere this morning that the Lonelygirl15 phenomenon was produced (actually, that link seems to have disappeared, at least for the moment, perhaps victim of a metafiltering) by a group of filmmakers with a connection to a major Hollywood talent agency. And around the net, folks are crying “fraud,” “sham,” “bogus,” etc.

It’s that reaction that drives me a bit up a tree: not the drive to find out who’s actually making the videos, but the conviction that, if they aren’t in fact the home-brewed product of a 16 year old girl who is exactly who and what she claims to be, they’re a lie, and of no value whatsoever. I’ll blow this particular horn as often as I need to—which, alas, seems to be pretty often—but honestly, folks: have we never heard of fiction? That’s the thing where somebody makes up a story because it’s (a) entertaining, or (b) edifying, or (c) both of the above. Why have we as a culture gotten so locked in to the notion that the only value in narrative is truth value, and that the only truth value is that which can be demonstrated to be verifiably “real”? Are we all really that literal?

I’d go on, but I’m in a bit of a rush. Instead I’ll direct you to past maunderings on this issue, here, here, and here.

Good lord, but this is depressing.

So depressing, in fact, that I can’t even comment any further.

I just did something that was either absolute genius or pretty much evil.  Or maybe just borderline stupid.

There’s someone out there, someone young and female, who is convinced that my mac.com email address is hers.  How do I know this?  She has repeatedly signed up for Xanga accounts, on which she posts her violent responses to the million tribulations of adolescence, her cutting, her anorexia, her general abjection.

And she does so using my mac.com email address, so I get daily updates on her and her commenters.  The first couple of times this happened, I emailed the abuse folks at Xanga, asked them to deal with it.  The third time, I got proactive, so to speak, and used that contested email address (and the password I’m so easily able to obtain through it) to log in and change the email address on her account.

This kinda got stepped up this morning.  About a week ago, in a fit of fury over the now six-month-long total breakdown in calendar-and-contacts syncing functionality in .Mac, I began looking for alternate syncing mechanisms, and came upon Plaxo.  I signed up for a trial account and began poking around, only to decide that, in fact, I didn’t want to use the service.  (I don’t remember why.  Some scruple about not wanting to run information that personal through a social software system.) So when I started getting the messages from Plaxo to confirm my email address, I just ignored and trashed them.

Except they kept coming.  And so today I got frustrated, and logged in, and deleted my account.

Except.  You see this coming, right?  It wasn’t my account.  It was hers.  Which I fully realized in the split second before I hit delete.  And then went on and hit delete anyhow.

I thought something was weird when I tried to log in and my usual baseline “I’m not terribly worried about security here” password didn’t work, so I reset it.  And when I logged in, there were two email addresses assigned to the account: mine, and one with some variant on “cutiexox” as the username.  And in the upper left corner of the window, Plaxo welcomed to the site someone with a first name that starts with K but is not mine.

I feel somewhat bad for having done this.  Probably I should just have deleted my email address, and not killed the account altogether.  But I’m beginning to think that her continuing email confusion is on some level intentional.  Who gets their own email address wrong, repeatedly, over such a protracted period of time?

Part of me, too, keeps having these moments of regret about foiling my own opportunities for watching this girl’s story unfold, for being, in a deeply voyeuristic way, well beyond that of the regular reader of any online diary, somehow party to the tale.

And then I think of the spam that this kid could no doubt generate for me, not to mention the general obnoxiousness of lurking in her various accounts, and figure that we’re all better off this way.

You might not have noticed without my pointing it out, but several of the links at right have changed. I now have my very own subdomain for networked teaching projects, machines.pomona.edu, and so I’ve migrated my old projects (including the MarxWiki) to the new space. If you’ve linked to or bookmarked any of those projects, please update the URLs; the older versions will go away shortly.