Three points of interest today.

1. So CNN has an article on Jonathan Taylor Thomas, who apparently reappeared out of nowhere and has just turned 30. The only reason his name has any significance for me is because when I was younger and the fun thing to do with your friends was to have random sleepovers, my friend Lara used to “sleep talk” about dating JTT. I think we all knew she was faking it, but it was fun to mess with her.
Whenever she’d start her sleep dating, I always pretended to be JTT’s “little brother,” Timothy. Lara’d be having this romantic sleep-talk and I’d jump in with “HI, WHATCHA DOIN’, WANNA PLAY?” in a super obnoxious voice. She’d always respond with a disgusted, “ugh, TIMOTHY…Jonathan, your brother is SO annoying…”
Yeah. That news just dredged up that memory for whatever reason.

2. Apart from Facebook’s inane layout changes and Google’s obvious attempts to take over the world, there aren’t that many things that bother me about the internet. But one thing that really gets under my skin is when parents post excessive pictures of their children online. Some parents are able to do this fairly tastefully, but a great number of them aren’t. Of course, if your kids are no longer kids and have given you some form of consent regarding the posting of their lives on your Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr/blog, no big deal. But when you have pictures of babies, toddlers, kindergarteners…hell, even grade-school-age children plastered all over your site and it’s obvious that they are unable to give consent for this, it’s a problem. Ever heard of privacy?
And it’s not just the pictures. Regardless of whatever silly nickname you assign your child online (usually something like “Peanut” or “Mini Mom” or “Donut Boy” or “Daddy’s Little Marketing Tool”), blogging about personal stuff relating to your child is probably not the smartest move. Sure, little “Mommy’s Big Toe Lookalike” is not going to be known by that moniker once he hits puberty (hopefully), but it’s not unlikely that someone who knows your child—another parent or a teacher or even a classmate—could come across your blog, very easily connect the dots, and discover who that embarrassing story involving diarrhea and Disney’s Haunted Mansion was about.
I don’t know if parents just don’t realize this or if they just don’t care. If I ever, by some divine intervention, wind up with spawn, I will do my best to keep them out of my blogging life. Sure, I might post a (non-nude) baby pic or two and maybe something like a family Christmas pic, but Little Claudia will most certainly be sheltered from the blogging publicity that almost every other aspect of my life undergoes.

3. Is this really necessary? I mean, okay, I get it; we spend an exorbitant amount of time on the web and thus would like a way to document our time spent there, especially if a lot of it involves correspondence with friends (heck, I save my MSN Messenger conversations). But to call it “Egobook,” while descriptive, is kind of…distressing.

That is all.