Is there any way to collect old comments and blogs from my space?

No. Once its gone, deleted, ect., then it is gone. I ran into this problem before and was told by their security chief that they purposefully do a hard erase / permanent deletion just so as to avoid all the many hundreds of possible court cases / subpoenas that they would be involved in from every jurisdiction all over the world whenever someone complains about a posting / message on MySpace. Imagine how many times an employee would have to fly out somewhere just to testify about something. So it is more cost effective for them to just delete it.

Many multi-national and large (and not so large) corporations have gotten into that practice because they all saw what happened to Microsoft and Bill gates when long ago emails got 'resurrected' to much embarrassment.

Round Rock police use MySpace to arrest spray painting teen

Teen had pictures of past graffiti tags up

Click-2-Listen
By Isadora Vail
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, June 29, 2007

When Round Rock police saw Juan Romero's MySpace page, they said they were certain they had found the person who spray-painted a skate park in April.

When Romero was arrested last week, authorities said spray paint was visible on his hands and underneath his nails. The 19-year-old was arrested and charged with graffiti, a felony punishable by up to two years in prison.

Romero was spotted at the skate park by a passer-by who got his license plate number with his camera phone. Police searched Google and found Romero's page which they said had several photos and videos of the same graffiti name, or tag, that was found at Clay Madsen Recreational Center.

But this isn't the first time Round Rock has used the popular MySpace community Web site to track someone down, said spokesman Eric Poteet.

"We began using the site when it first appeared," Poteet said. "We use it for young criminals because it is their social media, and it is publicly accessible."

The police said they were able to find Romero, despite the 187 million registered MySpace u

NASHUA, N.H. --A prosecutor says photos posted on a Hudson teen's Myspace.com Web page led to the erosion of a plea deal that would have kept him out of jail for a fatal car crash last summer.

[...]
Full story here: http://www.boston.com/news/local/new_hampshire/articles/2007/06/29/plea_deal_for_teen_charged_in_fatal_crash_rejected/

One of the advantages of being the old coot in the office is the ability to function solely with a Big Chief tablet and a #2 pencil. I wouldn't know how to embarrass myself on MySpace if I wanted to.

Anyone remember programming computers with punch cards?

Whatever happened to Randolph Scott?

Thanks

I imagine you got more of an answer than you asked for.

Bob

Yes.

He died

Is there another way to capture the data from a different hard drive (one that might have connected to the posting?)

Sad about Randolph Scott.

What do you mean? The poster's hard drive or the postee's? Either one, I would doubt it as the information is solely stored on the MySpace servers. The postee (for lack of a better term) might -- might - just have something in the browser cache. But I seriously doubt it. And even if it was, you would still have to have some way of linking the stuff to a particular person. That's why I do all of my MySpace posting at the public library. Nice and anonymous!

The Statler Brothers

"Whatever happened to Randolph Scott, ridin' the trail alone?
Whatever happened to Gene and Tex and Roy and Rex, the Durango Kid - oh,
Whatever happened to Randolph Scott, his horse plain as could be...
Whatever happened to Randolph Scott has happened to the best of me..."

Actually, if you had access to any computer that had previously viewed the web page, you may be able to retrieve it from the cache files. It would depend on when the person visited the page and the amount of storage space allocated to caching web data. As I understand it, the browser downloads the different parts of the web page and stores them in a cache folder so that when you go back to that site, it only has to download the things that are different from the last time you were there. The web registry file can tell you when the site was last visited by that computer.

The internet site www.archive.org maintains files on many websites from different times in the past, currently myspace is blocked. A google search using specific terms and proper names can occassionally turn up myspace archived information cached by Google. I have no clue how this information would be authenticated nor who the custodian of records would be be? Snagit and Camtasia can be excellent tools for grabbing and saving photos, web pages and videos off the web, it will save anything it can see.