After news of the high-school student’s e–suicide note spread, the comment section of his page quickly grew with forlorn testimonials, sorrowful good-byes, and confessions of love. “wish i believed u wen you told me that you were really going to do this,” wrote one poster. Another added, “this could of ben stoped/all the people that knew didnt do shit/i had a good time with u in ceramics.”

In the ensuing days, Ballard’s MySpace page spread everywhere, with links landing on countless message boards. On YTMND.com, a site known for its often ruthless online parodies based on Sean Connery’s line in the 2000 film Finding Forrester, “You’re the man now, dog,” the suicide communiqué became an Internet meme. The cyber-anonymous mocked Ballard’s final letter, hurling epithets in his memory (“a selfish prick, a dumbass, and a tool”), and criticized his slapdash 11th-hour spelling. YTMND users even created wallpapered Web pages with animations of Ballard ending his life against blaring soundtracks of A Simple Plan’s drunk-driving-fatality ode, “Untitled (How Could This Happen to Me?)”

“YTMND is ridiculous,” writes “ im a CREEPª,” a 17-year-old Orange County female MySpace user who knew Josh well  and has been targeted for Josh-related YTMND attacks. “They destroyed who he was on their lil website pages and made a joke of his pain.”

Ballard’s page eventually got hacked with a Flash redirect that reportedly led to a YTMND.com page making fun of him. MySpace cancelled that account, leaving his domain open to anyone who wanted to register it (www.myspace.com/jloveb). Since then, the customized “jloveb” domain bounced back and forth between Ballard scoffers and defenders, who didn’t know the troubled high schooler personally but feel compelled to weigh in on the debate from their digital pulpits.

For example, one anonymous YTMND.com supporter spotted Ballard’s former domain open in mid February and immediately staked his claim. “We at YTMND have no sympathy for some loser who gave up his life,” the administrator declared in the “about me” field. “I do not promote or oppose making fun of Josh. I am simply against any ‘Josh Tribute.’ ”

Comments were just as gleefully condemning. On February 17, “Giancarlo” posted, “Joshua Ballard: He puts the ‘Bullet’ back in ‘Bulletin Space.’ ” That same day, “Sloan” e–cracked up: “lol, you rock. this is so funny.”

“The profile’s original intent was only to entertain,” the anonymous administrator later types via MySpace. “I never planned on turning it into an anti–Josh Ballard or anti-emo site. It was the comments on it that got out of hand.” But, he adds, “No matter what the cause of death, I don’t like MySpace tribute pages. If I died, I would never want my friends leaving personal thoughts about me on a page for everyone to see. These kinds of things should not be available for the public.”

Within a few days, that incarnation of the www.myspace.com/jloveb account got canceled by MySpace’s invisible overseers. (One of MySpace’s terms of use prohibits material that “harasses or advocates harassment,” and some of the page’s comments could be considered a violation of that policy.) Soon after, 22-year-old New Yorker Jennifer Wroten registered for the free domain. She’d already controlled it once but got so overwhelmed by the amount of impassioned messages filling her inbox that she canceled the account. Others reopened it and nasty anti-Ballard comments piled up; when it was finally shut down again, she decided to reclaim responsibility for it.

The www.myspace.com/jloveb url still receives regular traffic four months after Ballard’s suicide — more than 1300 views in Wroten’s first three days at the controls. Although she has tailored the page into a non-Ballard-specific get-help-if-you’re-considering-suicide plea featuring a rising sun and an inspirational Kierkegaard quote, she still gets hate mail. One England-based YTMND supporter sent a message to Wroten telling her to just give up. Why? “He belongs to the internet now.”

Squishy Princess
Ariel Alyssum Lannen  refused to be constrained, even by her own name: she preferred it spelled äRRiel. On MySpace, where most users shoehorn their personalities into standardized templates, äRRiel refused the boxes. Having taught herself HTML and CSS programming, she had reconstructed her profile into a layout that barely resembled a MySpace page. When the cursor rolled over her links, it flipped off visitors. A homemade button on her page teased voyeurs to “See my naked pics” — a ruse that sent users back to their own pages.

But äRRiel was also very sweet — her dad says “she never lost the innocence of a child” — as evidenced by an intricate black-and-white illustration of a little girl cuddling her cat, posted prominently on her page. In her MySpace photos, her pierced septum is juxtaposed by rounded cheeks and inquisitively penetrating eyes that recall a baby doll’s guileless innocence.