I guess I should come out and admit one of my guilty pleasures. When Friday evening rolls around, instead of thinking up a new post on how to game TechMeme or any other type of A-List link-bait, I turn to a category of blog feeds I have in my reader tagged Social Crime for my nerdy blogger-fun. A few days after taking over editorial duties here at Mashable, Pete handed me a massive OPML file that put anything I'd personally accrued to shame. In it were several feeds that indexed various news search services for social media related content. I noticed that about the time I started my editing shift, all the crime news that got caught in that net tended to hit the wire. I subsequently started creating a set of keyword feeds that allowed me to see stuff a bit more tailored to this niche.
Why, you ask? I suppose for the same reason we slow down on the freeway during a traffic jam. Perhaps I don't get enough stupidity in my daily diet of newsreading. Or maybe its just cheaper than buying detective novels at the grocery store. Whatever the reason, Pete gave me permission to pass a few of them on to you folks when I came upon something nominally or monumentally interesting. And I dub it the Social Media Crime Blotter.
Obligatory Crime Involving MySpace Morons
Seeing crime in and around MySpace isn't very uncommon, I'll give you that. On the other hand, it is somewhat noteworthy that we're seeing blogger-on-blogger crime here. Since Gabriel's MySpace has received the original press attention, it has had all comments and blog posts removed, making a forensic accounting of who said exactly what slightly impossible.
Whitehall PD say there have been at least 3 fights between the groups in the past several months. But, in the most recent incident, investigators say there is video of Cerchiori assaulting the other teen. No word if it has been posted to YouTube yet.
[via WZZM]
Facebook is Home to Asshattery, Too!
Instant party, right? It doesn't stop there. The images were posted to Facebook, and somehow Matt Drudge got a hold of them. Now, there appears to be a Facebook flamewar going back and forth between Penn State and Virginia Tech that has escalated to the level of death threats. From one of the Penn State students who wore the costume:
“This is a group of college students who now think it’s trendy to be upset about their friends being killed,” one of the two Penn State students who wore the costume said. “I don’t know what they teach people in Virginia Tech, but at Penn State we don’t learn to threaten people with murder to teach them that murdering is wrong.”
Sometimes the irony is just so thick, further comment or explanation just takes away from it.
[via Pennlive]
World of Warcraft Saved My Sister's Life!
Hans Jørgen Olsen and his sister were going for a stroll in a nearby forest when they were challenged by a moose, who was to say the least a bit perturbed that someone had invaded his territory. Olsen reacted with "the sort of reflexes that only come after spending days in Azeroth."
Olsen is a 12-year-old Norwegian boy, and a WoW fanatic. He quickly engaged his griefer skills by taunting the beast, yelling at the top of his lungs until the moose decided to turn his attack away from his sister and towards him. The girl ran off to go get help, but now Hans had the unenviable task of fighting a moose on his hands.
So Hans decided try out the skill he learned "at level 30 in World of Warcraft: feign death." No kidding; it's true, you can look it up.
So there you go. Something for the kids and to show the grownups that not all fun and games are a waste of time.