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smaller, wilder, and more fun
Tuesday, March 27 2007
Today I "released" my Barack Obama attack ad, putting a link in Digg.com to see what would happen. Let me tell you, the web isn't the way it used to be. Back in the day, back, for example, when Columbine high school was shot up by the Trench Coat Mafia, I could make a quickie website to capitalize on the flurry of web searches during the height of the post-massacre handwringing. Over the course of an hour of workplace procrastination, I could singlehandedly create a cultural phenomenon, one evidently so compelling that it actually attracted the investigative energies of the FBI (at a time when Mohammad Atta was learning to fly but not to land). That was back when AltaVista was the most popular search engine (one notoriously easy to game). And even when I wasn't gaming AltaVista, it was a simple chore to grab a great torrent of traffic from some hot CNN messageboard and direct it, for a few minutes at least, to the site of my choosing. All I had to do was post a compelling blurb and a link. I could get hundreds of hits this way over the course of a few hours, and I could usually count on a certain amount of viral marketing over the next several days.
Those days are over. These days, gaming search engines requires a vast network of zombie computers equipped with sophisticated captcha reading software to create spam sites and automatically spam blogs. Google was kind to me in the early days, but since my site moved from Spies.com, I've suffered badly in the Google relevancy ratings. Then at some point CNN.com and washingtonpost.com made it difficult to post clickable links. And with the profusion of MySpace.com sites and millions of half-assed blogs, it's become difficult to rise above the noise and be noticed. The most traffic I've ever gotten in recent times for one of my zany web campaigns has been something like 15 hits from Digg.com. That's never going to prime the pump of a viral web phenomenon. I'm just glad I was part of the web back when it was smaller, wilder, and more fun.
This afternoon I took Sally and Eleanor with me on a housecall in Woodstock that mostly resulted in me replacing a laptop's keyboard. I hadn't been there more than a few minutes before Sally had peed in several places on the client's floor. He's a good sport and cleaned it up, but I was embarrassed nonetheless. Sally has gotten worse and worse when it comes to peeing in other peoples' houses. She'd never think of peeing in her own house, but something about her alpha status, combined with age, has made her a urinational nightmare at the houses of other people. Eleanor, who plays omega to Sally's alpha, doesn't even want to pee in the yard in most situations; usually she goes into the bushes when she has to go.
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