Your typical blog entry
Stacy Innerst, Post-GazetteClick photo for larger image.
"I can't believe I haven't posted since Jan. 11.... people are really starting to wonder. .. rest assured.. I'm ok...I am currently recovering from a severe case of strep ... Today, I still feel yucky, but compared to the last few days, I feel great. I forgot to mention something yesterday ..... STEELERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks guys!!! You rock!!!!!"
Blogging
The Morning File made up that entry, but it's not far off from many blogs in its quality and informative nature. As you surely know, a blog is an online journal that allows people to expose themselves in cyberspace with mind-numbing accounts of their personal lives; set up a pulpit for rants; or share personal passions, such as nude stamp-collecting. Some are useful and of high quality, and most are not. Some are by well-known people of stature or ordinary people with something to say, and most are not.
Technorati.com, a search engine for blogs, says there's a blog born every second. The site tracks 27.2 million blogs, 60 times more than there were three years ago, and one that is doubling every 5.5 months. Of course, many a blog gets created and abandoned. But Technorati found a rising rate of retention; 13.7 million bloggers are still posting three months after their blogs were created!!!!
Outsourcing
Those crazy Indian call centers are a reliable source of humor. You know, some young woman named "Tiffany" in Bangalore with a thick accent and a thin grasp of your home city and American folkways. But Siliconvalley.com says the joke could be on us. India's leading news channel, NDTV, is producing a sitcom called "The Call Centre" in which the beleaguered staff has to put up with dense, rude, racist callers. In one scene, the London Telegraph reports, an American looking at porn on the Net calls for help because he can't switch off his computer. "Try shutting all the windows," the Indian tells him. The American proceeds to shut the windows in his apartment. Hardy-har-har.
The Brits come off poorly, but not as bad as we do. Director Richa Sahai says, "Americans emerge as the most foul-mouthed and stupid." A 23-year-old former sales manager told the Telegraph, "You get filthy anger boiling up straight away. I know it is frustrating, people trying to sell you things you don't want, and I can understand people being rude. But why get racist?" Or stereotypical, as in dumb, porn-watching Americans?
Outsourcing blogging
Anybody can blog about outsourcing. But who has thought of outsourcing blogging? The funny guys at blogoriented.com did last August: "Our general business model is a two-tiered effort to hire Chinese citizens to write blogs en masse for us at a valued wage. The first tier is to create original blogs. These blogs will pop up in various areas of the net and appear to the unknowing reader to be written by your standard American. Our short-term goal is to generate a steady stream of revenue through traditional blog advertising . . .
"The second tier of our plan is a blog vacation service where our employees fill in for established bloggers who need to take a break from regular posting. As all bloggers know, an un-updated blog is quickly forgotten. For a nominal fee we can provide seamless integration of filler."
Not everybody got the joke
Not all humanity is mentally equipped to get satire and other kinds of put-ons. Some of the dimmer-wits who responded to blogoriented.com in moral outrage:
"You should probably save a little of the seed money for one of those fire suits. I hear it gets hot in hell."
"I hope you realize that in a small way, people like you are the real reason other folks get so fed up with America that they fly airliners into buildings."
"What is sad about the whole thing is you know it's wrong, yet you continue."
This sums it up well
This guy might not have gotten it, either, but he vividly describes the blogging world: "Bravo, someone has recognized the blogosphere as like that of a fat guy who just ate way too much at the local buffet. It is getting cluttered with the good, bad, and ugly. There just has to be a way to get rid of all the ugly and keep some of the bad to help us for comparison purposes."
Attention, self-loathers
Blogoriented.com's three target groups:
1. Teenage girls
2. Normal bloggers (yuppies, moms, average college students)
3. Super bloggers (bi-polars, cynics, liberals, outcasts, super-hip)
The founders: "The key to a good Group 3 is to spend 80 percent being negative about certain areas of culture and 15 percent excessively positive. The last 5 percent should be used for self-loathing because the blogger likes certain 'un-hip' culture."
These are sure-fire hits
Blogoriented.com's top five blog ideas:
A blog from the perspective of a stray cat in NYC.
A blog by a 14-year-old depressed Iowa girl.
A blog about life as a math professor in a southern community college.
A blog about being a plus-sized model in Kentucky.
A blog about being a weatherman in California.
The founders: "Our most talented guy keeps writing about how the weatherman got his forecast wrong and is sad. We are also considering the ethical ramifications of having one of our faux-bloggers get wrongfully accused of murder."
First Published: February 9, 2006, 5:00 a.m.
