Have you met Fred? I've known Fred since October of last year. I was reading the Dayton Daily News online, and Fred invited me to join his site in order to win stuff, so I did (join, that is — haven't won shit). I haven't paid Fred much attention since, only checking in on him if he or one of his friends e-mails me, which doesn't happen often but did happen today.

Fred is Cox Ohio Publishing's answer to MySpace, but Fred is to MySpace as Dayton is to New York City, or perhaps actually as Fairborn is to New York City. As of right now, Tuesday afternoon, the newest post is actually from "late morning" today, but the 10th newest (Fred shows you the 10 latest "blogs and announcements") was from "evening time" on the 15th. In other words, less than 10 posts a day, so you don't have to check constantly to avoid missing anything.

When I visit Fred I like to check out how many men (350), women (409), marrieds (61), singles (100), breeders (190), queers (only 7, including me, so Fred won't be replacing gay.com any time soon) he knows. Neither marrieds + singles nor breeders + queers adds up to the total number of men + women, so I'm guessing people have to pick a gender but not the rest. Adding men + women shows that poor Fred has only 759 friends. I'm surprised Fred isn't ashamed to give these various totals. Even Hillary Clinton has 10,734 MySpace friends.

One person who's not Fred's friend is David Esrati, who mocked Fred shortly after his birth and likes to mock Fred's family. No, I don't know Esrati's MeetFred screen name.

I'd always thought Fred was a local creation, since back when Fred knew only 4 queers, shortly after his birth, I'd been surprised to discover that I knew two of them, a couple who live in my apartment building on my floor and both of whom actually work for Cox taking care of, among other things, Fred. But Esrati seems to think that Fred runs on Drupal, and looking at the headers of the message I got from Fred today, I realized that Fred actually lives in California, at DreamHost, not with his folks at CoxOhio.