I can haz linkie linkie
3 April 2009
The preceding blog post (Love is but a twitter away), for example, miss out on a lot of optimisations that have become par for course in our age of efficient punditry that’s unencumbered by facts.
To wit, some advice for myself for future blog posts:1
The opening is horribly inefficient. I should have started with a link to some social media punditry blog and called them out as idiots. The ruder and more off base, the better.2
The title makes no sense. What does it mean? People who need to know exactly how things work—be in the “know”—don’t have time for phrases that just sound vaguely poetic.
It should have been concrete and actionable: “15 reasons why social media is destroying our culture” and the post itself should have been broken up into nicely digestible bullet points with plenty of bolded and italicised pithy phrases.
The ambiguous and conflicted nature of the post was counterproductive. Take a stand! Don’t just worry that things might be changing. Don’t just try and present the image of two struggling trends as food for thought. Pick a side and burn the heretics! Figuratively speaking, of course.
Link to both the cheerleaders and naysayers of social media and accompany each link with an outrageous exaggeration or misrepresentation of their views. Do that for both the side you agree with and those you disagree with.3
Send all of them passive-aggressive e-mails letting them know that you admire them all but that they’re cunts if they don’t link to your post.
Link to a few of the posts that are on the front page of Techmeme. Insert flagrant, off-topic statements just to carry links to the headliners that are completely irrelevant, just on the off chance that they might bring traffic.4
Work a pitch for consultation services somewhere.5
End the post with a facile statement masquerading as a question in an attempt to sound more diplomatic and spur comments.
Twitter about writing the post.
Twitter about publishing the post.
Twitter about the idiots that disagree with the post.
Twitter about the idiots that agree with the post.6
Digg/Reddit it and start an argument in the comment threads on each service, use sock puppets to fake consensus.7
Twitter about some fake controversy I’ve started on Digg or Reddit.
Sit back and watch the money roll in. What? No ads? Bad, bad blogger! No linkie linkie munchies8 for you!
As you see, the blogging “industry” has developed a state of the art, standard practice for how these things are done. Ignore it at your own peril. Mainstream media beware!
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I’m joking, you fools. ↩
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Picking a fight is standard practice in Web 2.0. Not just for blogs anymore. Businesses do it as well! It must be good. ↩
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I don’t know whether this practice stems from gross incompetence of most pundits in the field or from a premeditated tactic, but it is standard practice. ↩
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Doesn’t work anymore, now that Techmeme is a linkblog with a little algorithmic guidance, but that doesn’t stop it from being, again, standard practice. ↩
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I’m not looking for consultation gigs, I’d rather make stuff, but it seems to be what everybody else is doing. ↩
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To say that I have a love-hate relationship with twitter is an bit of a misrepresentation. I fucking loath the service, its design and suspect that its cheerleaders were dropped on the head as infants a few dozen times. It is useful for following the activities of people who aren’t your friends or family (for those, you use facebook) and as a supplement to Google Reader. I post there occasionally out of the misguided idea that you’re not supposed to just lurk on twitter. ↩
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Digg and Reddit are good because they keep the idiot population of the web occupied, much in the same way as 4chan. Just don’t let them notice you or it’ll get about as enjoyable as wandering into your favourite gay bar and finding that it has been converted into a sports bar for chavs. Either way is a good for completely ruining an evening. ↩
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Oh, the joy of completely inappropriate and nonsensical stylistic emphasis. It’s a kind of ongoing running theme for the internet as a whole, if you haven’t noticed. I think Jakob Nielsen started the joke in the late nineties and, somehow, everybody’s been doing it straight-faced since. Who says the internet isn’t capable of uniting on a subject? ↩
