Friday, August 24, 2007

One in a Million

The Page

So what can we deduce from this page? The music playing in the background is Christian - so it's probably safe to assume that the owner of this page is as well, and is focusing on reaching a Christian audience. She's got her pastor as one of her friends, so that bears this out.

If we ignore the obvious indications that she's female - such as her picture, or stat box, we can still tell this from the background that she has chosen. Admittedly, it's extremely hard to discern a person's gender from cues such as color, font, design, and etcetera, but the quiz posting calling herself "Cinderella" provides more than enough evidence to back up this guess. The background also marks her as young, and trying to be noticed. An older or more sedate person would have chosen a more quiet background.

She has an interest in sports - either playing them, or at least watching them. No less than three of her four posted videos involve sports in some fashion.

While she wanted to stand out and appear different, she didn't use any originality - her design is from a free layout site. The grey on grey design does cause some problems with contrast, and the background is far too busy for optimal viewing, so she obviously isn't much for design herself. The slideshow would bear out this theory - besides the fact that it has been placed in her interests box, it too is from a free site, and does not match the rest of the page's theme very well. The photos it displays aren't well composed either - so I have to guess that she is not extremely artistic.

So, to summarize: We have a young, outgoing Christian youth, interested in sports, who is trying to get noticed and stand out. She does not have much artistic skill, but has invested a great deal of time into her page. The main message is "Notice me!" - with a name like "One in a million", that message is far from subtle. (On a side note, her use of "Once in a million" as a name also implies that she feels like merely one in a million, or lost in a large group, and is trying to compensate. Could be a bit of a Freudian slip there, or I could just be making things up.) Her audience consists of friends in her area, probably mostly from her church.

I think that that is all of the information available on this page. I did not examine most of the written information on this page, such as her comments list or detail box, and I did not examine her friends list.

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