I’m a few days late in welcoming Advertiser news intern and newest blogger Kelli Miura to the exploding community called Advertiser Blogland. Welcome, Kelli!

Her blog, Campus Life 101, is off to a great start with a post about summer school. I’m sure the topics she chooses will be something that we Quarterlifers can relate to … even if it’s just reliving the good ol’ college days.

So, be sure to check out Campus Life 101. Ah, nostalgia!

You can probably tell from the lack of blog posts yesterday and the day before that I’ve come down with a case of uninspired-itis again. Here are some things that interested me today:

Preggers.

Disturbing: A pact between teenage girls at Gloucester High School to get pregnant was at least partly behind a rise in the number of pregnancies there, according to the AP.

The school’s principal told Time magazine that several girls confessed to making the pact. The school started to worry when 17 girls, none over 16, became pregnant. The school average is four pregnancies per year.

The principal told Time, according to the AP, that “[s]ome of the girls reacted to the news they were pregnant with high fives and plans for baby showers.”

I wish teenagers would stick to trends like black nail polish or Hello Kitty pencil cases — things that can be rubbed off or thrown away or outgrown … not like a baby.

In other news…

Seventeen year-old Jamie Lynn Spears gave birth to a baby girl on Thursday. Hm.

Attack of the Clones (in a good way).

The Guardian reports that a man whose skin cancer had spread to his lung and groin was cleared of all traces of the disease after doctors injected him with five billion of his own immune cells.

Cloning was used to create billions of the man’s own cells, which, when they were put back into his body, starting attacking the cancer. Tests showed that tumors in the patient’s body disappeared within two months of the treatment and had not reappeared two years later.

Doctors believe that the treatment could work in about a quarter of people with skin cancer whose immune systems are already primed to attack the cancer, the article said.

Hat tip to juh for the link.

Aloha, Azerbaijan!

Hawaii state House Rep. Gene Ward’s Thursday op-ed in the Advertiser about a recent women’s rights conference in Azerbaijan got a mention in APA, which covers news in that Eurasian country. Amusingly, the news service labeled Ward a “Congressman,” and included beside the article what I think is a photo of the U.S. House? Senate?

Congress, legislature, it’s all the same. Oh well.

Props to Ward for looking beyond Hawaii and offering his perspective on an important international issue.

What’s a Blog For?

There’s a 6-comment discussion going on over at Poinography regarding the Advertiser blogs, in response to Doug White’s recent post about Editor Mark Platte’s June 15 column about blogging. For the most part, the comments (all besides mine) are pretty critical of the approach to blogging the Advertiser has taken.

This underscores an interesting and current debate about the purpose of a blog. When I first got to blogging back in high school, blogs were online diaries where you’d post your thoughts, feelings, angry poetry, song lyrics and other gibberish. Flash forward 10 years later and blogs are transforming the media landscape with insider analysis or information posted minutes or seconds after news breaks.

A lot of the Advertiser blogs more closely resemble the online diary model than the Daily Dish (Andrew Sullivan), Instapundit, Boing Boing or Talking Points Memo models. Which is great, if you’re just looking to offer your two cents about cell phones, but annoying if you’re looking for something with more, well, substance, or insider info that all of us reporters are supposedly toting around in our pockets. Believe me, if it were THAT interesting, we’d have written about it by now.

Some of the government/politics and business-oriented blogs don’t so much follow the diary model as they’re written by reporters who know their blog subject intimately. That goes for the sports bloggers, as well. Of course the Advertiser would like to supply readers with more blogs about things they’re interested in. But it seems just from the numbers that what readers want isn’t always what’s most pressing or significant in the grand scheme of things. I’ll admit it — it’s puzzling to me when a post I write about slippers gets 10 times as many comments as one Jerry Burris writes about important rumblings in state government.

Let me follow that by saying that I do not begrudge anyone their blog posts about slippers, as reading about Hawaii politics can get depressing.

I suppose Quarterlife Cafe would probably fall into the category of “meaningless fluff” designed to entice the twenty-something crowd into reading the newspaper. But, hey, if I can get just one more apathetic twenty-something to read just one more article and learn just one more important aspect of some Hawaii issue, then I’ll write all the meaningless fluff I can muster.

Happy Aloha Friday!

Where did your parents meet? In college? At a concert? At work?

Online?

Odds are, if you’re my age or older, your parents probably didn’t meet and fall in love on the Internet. For many couples nowadays, however, that first romantic spark could have happened through an online social networking site, an online dating site, a chat room — even an online game.

Nowadays, there’s an online dating site for everybody. Through the wonders of Facebook and MySpace, it’s possible to connect with singles on your area according to specifics like musical interests and movie tastes. There is a site for single parents, and one for singles with disabilities. Several of my Jewish friends have met people through JDate, a site for Jewish singles that has about 700,000 members.

There is even one for pirates. It is called Pirates Passions.

“Ahoy, me Hearrrties!” the welcome message says. “If ye be seekin’ booty, ye be havin come t’ th’ right place. Pirates Passions be a 100% free social networrrkin’ an’ online datin’ site ferrr buccaneers an’ buccanneers at hearrrt.”

Despite its popularity, fears remain, like, is it really OK to meet a total stranger you’ve only spoken with in a chatroom? And what about the other stigma: that Internet dating is somehow reserved only for those who lack the social skills to meet people in real life?

How do couples who met online address this when talking to others about how they met? Would you tell your wedding guests? Your kids?

Is Internet dating still, in some ways, a taboo topic?

I’ve honestly never had the urge to try online dating. I admit it sort of scares me. I grew up in the Internet age, where the rule about never meeting online strangers in person was right up there next to the one about looking both ways before crossing the street.

I wonder if true love is possible via the Internet, though. Surely, meeting someone in a chat room lacks the romantic ring of traditional, in-person first-time encounters, like meeting on a blind date, or falling in love in college biology class — although I can think of many a thing more romantic than college biology class.

I expect that five or 10 years from now, meeting and falling in love on the Internet will become more commonplace, and maybe won’t have the same stigmas that some couples are now dealing with. In time, describing the first instant messages you exchanged could be as cute and romantic a story as any your parents ever told.

And if you met on Pirates Passions, wouldn’t THAT be a good story to tell. Arrrrrrrrr.

Cartoon: OnlineDatingMagazine.com

I’ve been following this story because I believe it could have some major implications for cyberbullying and fake profile pages on social networking pages like MySpace.com and Facebook … or at least the potential to start some interesting discourse about such things.

In 2006, 13-year-old Megan Meier (pictured) befriended who she thought was a cute, flirtatious 16-year-old boy on MySpace. Megan, who was suffering from attention deficit disorder and depression, thought she had finally found a friend in “Josh Evans,” when he suddenly cut off their friendship and started sending her hateful messages, including one that allegedly said the world would be better off without her.

Megan hanged herself in her bedroom closet shortly after.

It was later discovered that the “Josh Evans” MySpace account was fake, allegedly created by a mother and her daughter to find out what Megan felt about the daughter and other people. On Thursday, a Los Angeles federal grand jury indicted Lori Drew, 49, the woman who allegedly created the MySpace account, on a charge of conspiracy and three counts of fraudulently accessing someone’s computer.

Why should we care? Forget kids meeting face-to-face and beating each other up at lunchtime — now they can do that AND post the evidence on YouTube. Besides videos, sites like MySpace, which essentially allow anyone to create a profile as any person they wish (real or not), have enabled catty teenagers to take their cattiness to cyberspace and, often, inflict far more psychological and emotional damage. It’s one thing to endure a bully at school when you can call in the principal or go home after class. It’s quite another when bullying reaches the internet and it’s impossible to escape.

There’s another reason, of course, which a Los Angeles Times op-ed today lays out nicely:

[As] hard as it may be to feel sympathy for Drew, what the Justice Department has done should alarm anyone who uses the Internet. The legal theory underpinning this case could just as easily be used to attack other kinds of anonymous speech online, including whistle-blowing, or to enforce dubious contracts that websites impose unilaterally on their users.
…

Terms of service online are routinely breached, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes deliberately. Violations include checking work e-mail from home (most residential broadband services forbid business uses) and submitting fake personal information when posting comments online. If a terms-of-service violation were all it took to bring federal charges, overly zealous prosecutors would be in a position to indict just about anyone who used the Internet.

Of course, the use of the statute in this case could be challenged, but just THINK about the implications.

It’s hard not to think about how Megan’s parents would feel should the people involved in tormenting her daughter be sent to prison. It’s also hard not to think about what such a conviction would mean for everyone who’s ever posted anonymously on the internet.

Traditional reporters won’t be the only ones writing news and updates from the Democratic National Convention in August. As part of the State Bloggers Corps announced yesterday by the Democratic Party, 55 bloggers will receive “unparalleled access” to state delegations and the floor of the Convention hall, and will be seated with their respective delegations during the four-day convention in Denver.

Ian Lind, of iLind.net, was selected from Hawaii to blog from the convention. Lind’s blog, written from his home in Kaaawa, is something of a go-to site for politically-minded people in Hawaii for state and local politics, media news, commentary and some pretty excellent photos of friendly felines and canines. Congrats to him.

More than 400 bloggers applied. The selected bloggers represent every state, as well as D.C., Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and one blogger who represents Democrats abroad. Some are professional efforts, some are blogs written by individuals. From USA Today:

Convention spokeswoman Natalie Wyeth said the criteria used to select the blogs included how politically active they were and Web traffic. For example, the blogs needed to be at least six months old, and have had a minimum of 120 politically-related posts. The blogs also submitted daily audience number from Technorati, a website tracking service.

Here’s the full list of bloggers by state, from the DNC’s own blog. I’m excited for August.