No charges filed in MySpace suicide

Lori Drew can relax.

"Their purpose was never to cause her emotional harassment that we can prove," [St. Charles County Prosecutor Jack] Banas said. "There's a difference between what people think or what we may believe the reason was that they created this, it's what we can prove and what a jury would believe."

Banas said statements from the neighbor and two teens who participated in the fictitious account couldn't meet criminal standards for the state's statutes on harassment, stalking or endangering the welfare of a child.

"Their purpose was never to cause emotional harrasment"? I'd like to know what their purpose was, then.

Parents these days

What the hell is wrong with them?

Like this Internet hoaxer who allegedly bullied a child to death by posing as a cute boy on MySpace. This moral idiot wanted to see what the dead girl, Megan Meier, 13, was saying about her daughter with whom Megan had been friends. Yes, that's right, 48-year-old Lori Drew inserted herself in a squabble between two teenage girls not by acting like a mother and urging her daughter to get over the rift and move on, but by acting like a middle school student.

I don't know how familiar my readers are with teenage girls, but they're a volatile lot. I speak from experience, having been a teenage girl. I once didn't speak to my best friend for an entire summer because she refused to try on a pair of pajamas I gave her for her birthday. We had been inseparable until then. We were inseparable after that. During the interregnum, I vaguely remember my mother asking me what had become of my friend. I believe she sighed and called me an idiot when I explained the situation. The incident ended there as far as my mother was concerned.

Lori Drew chose a different course. She decided that the adult thing to do was to pose as a teenage boy, befriend Megan and then inexplicably turn on her and post nasty things about her on MySpace.

The mind boggles.

Ever get the feeling you've seen everything on the Internet

And are now making a second run through the content? When I linked to breast milk cheese the other day, I had a funny feeling that I might have seen it--and linked to it--before. Now I find that this (via GeekPress) has a strong scent of déjà vu about it.

Googling baby names

To get a high search rank for your baby.

Before Abigail Garvey got married in 2000, anyone could easily Google her. Then she swapped her maiden name for her husband's last name, Wilson, and dropped out of sight.

In Web-search results for her new name, links to Ms. Wilson's epidemiology research papers became lost among all manner of other Abigail Wilsons, ranging from 1980s newspaper wedding announcements for various Abigail Wilsons to genealogy records listing Abigail Wilsons born in the 1600s and 1700s. When Ms. Wilson applied for a new job, interviewers questioned the publications she listed on her résumé because they weren't finding the publications in online searches, Ms. Wilson says. (See Google results for Abigail Garvey and Abigail Wilson.)

So when Ms. Wilson, now 32, was pregnant with her first child, she ran every baby name she and her husband, Justin, considered through Google to make sure her baby wouldn't be born unsearchable. Her top choice: Kohler, an old family name that had the key, rare distinction of being uncommon on the Web when paired with Wilson. "Justin and I wanted our son's name to be as special as he is," she explains.

It's one thing to want to give your baby a unique name, quite another to name him after a faucet.

Banned in China

C'est moi, via Coyote Blog, who can be accessed there.