Please sponsor my 5k swim coming up in April and help support Marie Curie Cancer Care, an organisation which provides home nursing care to people with terminal illnesses.

You probably know by now that GeoCities has officially disappeared from the web, and while this has led to a lot of well-deserved jokes about the death of blinking text, obnoxious graphics, and other aspects of awful webdesign, it’s worth remembering that GeoCities also represented an important stage in the development of the web and how we participate in it. I don’t think I’m the only person who built their first website (or, as we called it back in the mid-90s, homepage) there and eventually moved to their own domain. Now, I will admit to having used a few obnoxious bouncing graphics when I started out, but it was by playing with webdesign on GeoCities that I learned just how distracting those could be (as well as which colors of text and background don’t work so well together). It was also how I learned HTML. GeoCities also helped me learn about the importance of interactivity. (Remember guestbooks?)

GeoCities also had, in nascent form, some of what we now consider aspects of Web 2.0. The homepages were organized into theme-based communities. (I was in SoHo with the other artists, SoHo/Cafe to be specific.) Through neighborhood-based directories and chats, you could connect with your “neighbors”. This never really developed into the sort of connectivity you can see in later community sites such as Livejournal, and in some ways GeoCities actually went backwards after Yahoo! bought it (at least, interest-based communities seemed to be de-emphasized).

RIP GeoCities!!!!!!

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We’ve all heard about the potential for rumors to spread rapidly through social media, especially Twitter, and you’ve probably seen a false report of a celebrity death or two if you’re at all active in the same. As yesterday’s panic on the Potomac shows us, however, it isn’t only online media that is vulnerable to mistaken reporting. When networks run with unsubstantiated reports, however, the effect is quite different from when such things are spread primarily by citizen reporters tweeting.

Because supposedly reliable news agencies, starting with CNN, were reporting gunshots fired, the DC police department rushed to the scene, while flights at Reagan National Airport were grounded. I’m not sure that a trending topic on Twitter would have had such an impact, yet rumors instigated through Twitter tend to get fact-checked rather quickly through @ replies looking for verifiable sources.

If someone saying “bang bang” over a loudspeaker had started off a rumor about gunfire that was confined to social media, we would all be having a good laugh right now about how silly people were to confuse the two and how gullible the people who passed the story on were. Instead we’re getting a lot of talking-head outrage about the Coast Guard training on 9/11 and letters from networks justifying their coverage decisions. The coast guard is reviewing their procedures.

Now, maybe the Coast Guard should have been more sensitive to people’s fears. That said, the story shows the speciousness of arguing against social media as an information source because it is vulnerable to false information. It also calls into question how we decide which misinterpretations should be anticipated or, failing that, taken seriously.

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One of Facebook’s more popular applications, Pick 5 by Living Social shares much of the appeal of writing poetry in reproducible forms (new or traditional). Pick 5 starts with a sometimes user-generated (and occasionally sponsored)  category or question. To choose your five answers, you start typing in a text box to generate a list of words or phrases with images; if you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can upload your own picture. You can post your answers to your profile and compare your answers with your friends’.

The pleasure of Pick 5, then, is in seeing what your friends have selected within this form—how the lists your friends and acquaintances create differ from or resemble your own. This isn’t all that different from a group of friends comparing their sestinas, abecedarians, or Spenserian sonnets. I do not mean to suggest that creating a sestina is as easing as filling in the blanks (though my most successful preteen poem, a line-by-line transformation of The Raven into The Swim Coach, certainly followed a similar procedure), only that at least some of the joys of writing formal verse are similar to the joys provided by applications such as Pick 5.

Still, there is another level to this. Some of the best Pick 5s, like much of the best formal verse, stretch the form. A category may be taken in a snarkily literal way: according to the application, very few of my Facebook friends leave the house without their heads. Sarcastic answers to the favorite parts of the Fourth of July category included variations on things burning down. Imagined dinner party guests have been chosen on the basis of who would have the best arguments rather than who would be most interesting to meet. The rules of the form are broken when someone chooses the same item for all five slots. This latter case is most similar to Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets, of which Juliana Spahr noted:

…despite constant allusions to the tradition of the sonnet, Mayer’s are not within the box. One of Mayer’s sonnets has a long prose note attached to it on landlords and rent. Another has eight lines. Another twenty-seven. Some rhyme in doggerel. Some in more elaborate patterns. Some have regular rhythm. Some not. The grammar continually violates the conventional regularities of the sonnet. 

Mayer’s work, however, required much more background reading before it could be written and much more attention to craft to make it work.

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Even as CNN cuts every five minutes to show the latest maps of suspected and confirmed cases of swine flu in the US (with occasional mentions of the rest of the world) there’s a lot that that’s being left out of the story. Here are five things you probably haven’t heard much about in connection with the flu:

1. Industrial Agriculture: Animals living in cramped, unhygienic quarters provide a breeding ground for new viruses, allowing them to hop from host to host, swapping DNA as they go. The drugs that they animals are pumped full of to keep them “healthy” actually make this worse because it means that the viruses that survive and thrive are drug-resistant strains. This current virus does respond to Tamiflu and Relenza, older anti-virals have no effect.
2. Poverty: Many of the first people to come in contact with the zoonotic viruses bred on factory farms live in cramped quarters with little access to hygienic facilities. This means that the disease passes on to more people more quickly. Also, the less money you have, the less likely you are to be able to afford missing work when you’re ill. The disease spreads to co-workers (and customers).
3. Air Pollution: The swine flu can lead to pneumonia. People whose respiratory systems are already under stress—from living in a highly polluted area, for example—are more likely to develop this complication. Given how polluted Mexico City is, it seems odd that this hasn’t been considered as a possible explanation for why the strain is less deadly (so far) in the US.
4. Potential Food Supply Disruption: If the swine flu does reach pandemic status, it’s likely that the food supply would be disrupted (and that you won’t want to go to the grocery store even if it isn’t). I’m sure you’ve already been told not to panic, so I won’t tell you again. I will, however, advise you to stock up on canned goods. If, like me, you live in an earthquake zone, you know you should have done this already.
5. Zombies: OK, so zombies actually have nothing to do with swine flu, but every major story should be connected to zombies by people on the Internet. This law is even more universal than Godwin’s.

As many of you already know, I’m one of the founding editors of a group feminist blog that launched earlier this month, Gender Across Borders. Here’s a quick list of my posts over there:

• Book Review: The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh
• It’s About Respect (on the “fight club” at a Corpus Christi State School)
• Dubai’s Open Secrets are the World’s Dirty Secrets
• In Memoriam: Sitara Achakzai
• Book Review: The Commoner
• Changing China’s Gender Gap
• Women and Global Warming
• Suffragist Poetry