Park Avenue leads to Skid Row

In the interest of service journalism (and, okay, clearing my own head) I took the liberty of researching MySpace trackers tonight. Well, if you consider Google a valid research system.

Everything I found seemed to reiterate what I have heard - that most trackers only give IP addresses and basic information along the lines of Sitemeter, and the few that do show profiles, only show other people who are signed up for the same tracker. And because there are about 10 different kinds of trackers and most invade profiles with a bunch of ugly ads, it's safe to assume they aren't exactly mainstream yet. I did come across a great blog that sums everything up; you can check it out here.

I got a bit sidetracked by one of the tips on the blog, which was entering latitude and longitude points to get the exact cross street for readers. Forgetting about MySpace, I opened my blog Sitemeter and ran down a list of IP addresses I haven't been able to identify. Did it work?

Well, kind of, at least in terms of telling me what I already knew. For instance, if the company name was listed alongside the IP address, then, yes, the street location matched up. But since a lot of businesses work off a proxy, the information isn't accurate to begin with, so I come up with a map of Nebraska or something where I'm pretty sure I don't have any readers.

Residences are the most difficult to pinpoint, and while I found plenty of intersections in LA, New York, and Boston which all seem reasonable, I can't think of anyone who actually lives there. Since I wasn't even sure how accurate Mapquest would be able to track, I decided to enter the coordinates of someone I know, and compare. I used a friend's information as my guinea pig, and was I shocked at what turned up:

Map of Latitude: 34.0416
Longitude: -118.2988

Go ahead and zoom in - the second button to the top is best. See it?

A cemetery. A freaking cemetery.

My friend does not live in a cemetery, but she does live in a house only a few miles away that she swears is haunted. Apparently, an old couple lived and died there two or three tenants before her, and once in a while make their presence known through noises or atmospheric changes or through objects that mysteriously go missing. Do I need to reiterate how I feel about ghosts? Let's just say that I don't want any haunting my blog, even from across town.

Spooked, I tracked my own IP address. Should have just done that in the first place. According to Mapquest, I live somewhere on or about Skid Row. Unfortunately, however, Sebastian Bach is nowhere to be found.

So this concludes my self-assigned research piece. I don't actually care who looks at my MySpace, and the blog tracker is primarily for safety. This whole thing began out of (hopefully needless) embarrassment for OD'ing on a certain gym boy's profile. Although, at this point, I think I should probably be more embarrassed by the amount of time I put into this at all.