I now have 100 friends, according to the calculator used on MySpace. It was a long, hard weekend spent coming up with 100 friends, but, you know, it was either that or cut the grass.
Hopefully, I have more than 100 friends. Hopefully, more than a few hygienists that I know through RDH magazine consider me to be a friend. Hope the neighbors think I'm friendly enough. Hope Kristine Hodsdon, the director of RDH eVillage, thinks of me as a friend.
But check out my profile. Be my friend.
Is MySpace really making me think about my definition of friendship?
Nah, I know who my friends are. And, like most of you, I'm leery of friendships developed over the Internet. Too many bad news stories show up on television.
Maybe this on-a-lark venture into MySpace will result in a few more legitimate friendships, but the main motivation for it came from my next-door neighbor at PennWell — Kevin Henry. Kevin is the editor of Dental Office magazine, which is distributed primarily to dental assistants. We were shooting the breeze one day a couple of weeks ago about how we could blog about our experiences as dental editors on MySpace.
So I began cultivating friends for MySpace while he disappeared to Japan.
Nah, you don't have to travel to Japan to evade a real friend's dare to join MySpace. He's on a legitimate business trip and has, indeed, blogged about his trip this week on our group.
In the meantime, I have enjoyed "friendships" in groups about Boston Terriers and the Appalachian Trail — two subjects of interest to me. MySpace is not quite the horror story you hear about. Much of it depends on how you personally behave when you access it.
To be honest, we did not know what we were going to do with our group, which is called Dental Team Members.
So far, we've commented on things that have happened to us as the editors of RDH and Dental Office. But we also want to open it up as an opportunity for you to ask us questions about the magazines. Yes, our e-mail addresses printed in the magazines still work just fine.
But all the way from MySpace, I'm asking ya: Be my friend.
— Mark
