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It is my policy to always be honest with you, my readers, unless I say something totally wacky. You will notice the importance of this fact as we discuss Internet blogging in general and the recent sale of MySpace.com to NewsCorp.

For those of you who have lives outside of the Internet, MySpace.com is a hybrid of a social-networking Web site and a blog.

This enables people to have their own Web sites, or “spaces,” in the fascinating vortex of information technology and nudity we call the World Wide Web.

There are lots of other Web sites similar to MySpace, like the Facebook, Friendster and Xanga. However, all of them serve the same purpose: Internet surfers read these personal “spaces” and leave insightful and encouraging comments ranging from “you RAWK!!!” to “you SUCK!!!”

They then add this person to their list of friends, even though they don’t know this person and will never even meet this person, who could be a maniacal serial killer with severed heads arranged in a feng shui pattern around his computer. This is called “networking.”

The truth is that I don’t really have a ton of respect for these social networking Web sites because it seems to me they provide a substitute reality for insecure people whose self-worth is measured by the number of friends/strangers/stalkers/serial killers they have in their friend count.

I’m also not really sold on the idea of a blog because I can only think of a few people who have said intelligent or meaningful things worth reading on a semi-daily basis during their lives, and they are: the Dalai Lama, Mark Twain, Sir Isaac Newton and Hobbes (both the author of “The Leviathan” and Calvin’s tiger).

But just you try telling this to a blogger, who invariably falls into one of two categories:

1. Bitter, unattractive pseudo-intellectual college students lacking real-world experience and blaming everything on the “mainstream.” These are the people who think they are really smart but never say anything remotely new or noteworthy, and who celebrate their individuality by being indistinguishable from other members of their group.

2. The physically attractive who might not be qualified to go to college, but their parents find a way in for them anyway.

These are the people who type like they are text messaging (the appeal of which never ceases to amaze me) – “2day i 8 a @ & c u l8r :=()>.”

Apparently there is a strict set of rules for these bloggers, the most important of which says: “I swear that as long as I blog there will be an untold number of spelling, punctuation and other grammatical errors in my blog, so help me God. If anyone attempts to point these out to me, I will attempt to make that person look like either an unintelligent fool or a patronizing jerk, when it is in fact I in need of third-grade grammar rules. But that’s OK, because I have a blog and am therefore outside the rules of proper conduct, LOL.”

It seems that those who blog and participate in MySpace are happy with what they’re doing, so far be it for me to discourage them. And I don’t have a personal Web page or a blog, so I’m essentially basing my opinions on ignorance (but hey, the president can do it).

I would also like to remind all of you that MySpace has in fact been sold to none other than NewsCorp, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch. He has added MySpace to his impressive list of acquisitions, which include Fox News, the New York Post, the Daily Mirror, Luxembourg and the Atlantic Ocean.

Some have found this controversial because Intermix Media, the company that used to own MySpace, was accused of infecting users’ computers with spyware.

For those who don’t know what spyware is, it’s like the gonorrhea of computer viruses. It installs stuff on your computer that makes you look at porn, or gamble, or use weird German search pages. Your computer also gets really slow, as if its CPU is being routed through Pakistan.

I know this because I got attacked by spyware last year, twice.

So I’m pretty much on the anti-spyware bandwagon now. I ended up having to spend my hard-earned Cal Grant money on a Mac like all the other Mac users out there, for whom a red-blooded American establishment PC is simply not good enough.

And it works great – no crashes or anything. So I wanted to warn you all to be careful.

I have a confession to make (remember, honesty): I have been using spyware in my column. Yes, if you string together the first letter of the second word of every third sentence, you’ll see that it spells “wocftuaswgaamkxebee),” which your brain translates as “send me money.”

So for that I apologize, and I recommend using caution with the new MySpace – unless you’re using a Mac, of course.

If you use MySpace or have your own blog and you want to complain about something Kaney wrote about it, that’s fine, but send a copy to him at akaney@media.ucla.edu.