Uh, yes hello? Yeah I just want the Fortune 500 world to know that like my brand new friend, Christopher Nelson, I am available to blog full-time for $100k a year.
We can settle the health benefits later, the important thing is that we get started right away. Of course blogging about the Dukes of Hazard is already being done (damn you Country Music Television!) but I can think of at least four, no, make that five other ideas for blogs that would make white-hot marketing mouthpieces:
1. A European Constitution, It's Grrrreat!
2. Spatulas, Spatulas, Spatulas
3. Caltrans Toll Roads
4. North Dakota, Today
5. Pimp mySQL
2. Spatulas, Spatulas, Spatulas
3. Caltrans Toll Roads
4. North Dakota, Today
5. Pimp mySQL
Look, if you're serious about skyrocketing word of mouth, driving mad traffic to your website, and selling more products than China can make in a day let's talk. And make it soon, I bet Scrivs is already registering the domains right now.
Join the fray by reading through and commenting at the end.
Haha, I'd like to see some MySQL pimping.
mmmm... 100k a year...
I spent my first 18 years in North Dakota. I'll gladly be a co-blogger for a measly $50k/year.
Pimp mySQL. Hilarious.
It's official: Blogging is Dead.
Podcasting, anyone?
Blogging is dead? I think not. What makes you say so?
Let me answer for Beerzie. Once an alternative activity is adopted, commodified, and made viable by the mainstream it is no longer alternative, and hence co-opted, slow[ed], commercialized, zipped, ripped, and pretty much over, at least in comparison to where it once was — aka, dead. Once money can be made it's a pretty sure sign that what's really interesting new (read transgressive) is actually happening elsewhere.
Blogging is dead...I don't think so either. Commercialization is not an automatic death sentence - it is just another phase of growth, and good things can still come out of it.
When I read absolute statements like that, I am reminded of those kids in high school who had to continually find a new, obsure band to follow because the old ones just kept getting popular, damn them.
Dude, pay me the 100k to write about Daisy Duke's ass and actually use the word Cooter in a blog post and I'll watch the blogdom burn from my penthouse suite waiting for valet to deliver me my General Lee! Hooowaaaa!
Those kids in high school were right. They knew that mass popularity and mainstream awareness inevitably changes the product, making it tamer, softer, less new, less interesting. Once something has been mainstreamed it is by definition no longer on the edge — and something else you haven't yet heard of is. When blogging can be a job and corporations are having meetings about how to use blogs as a public relations vehicle it means that blogging, as it began, has changed irrevocably. It's no longer transgressive, it's no longer cool. It's khakis from the Gap. It doesn't mean that good things can't come from it, it just means it's different. If what you thought was exciting about it was the purity of the uncommercialized outsider voice — it's largely over.
Calm down, guys. I was just kidding. But it does signal a lame trend.
And Mathew, I have burned all of my Wilco albums now that they are so mainstream.
The Dukes of Hazzard is one of those time-warp mysteries: as you go back and watch it again some things get better and some do not. The jokes, the acting does not, but the banjo twangs and those short cut-offs do. I realized in my youth that I watched it for all the wrong reasons. Of course the General Lee's horn is still the bomb.
6. Iraqi Love Sonnets
7. Deep Throat: 33 Years of Introspection.
Perhaps the meaning of blogging has changed over these years, but it's growing faster than ever, as seen from blogger and movabletype.
To continue the music metaphor, that's like saying punk rock is more popular than ever, because Green Day is at the top of the charts and kids with blue hair and piercings are seen working at regular jobs. The purist would say that despite appearances, it ain't punk rock anymore, and exactly what made punk originally so vibrant was its outsider status. They would argue that bands like Blink 182 are 'corporate punk' and just a bland, emasculated, retreaded version of what once was. Music people in the know would agree. It ain't about popularity, it's about essence.
Who cares?
Just do your thang and everything will be alright.
In the immortal words of the 69 Boys:
"Say look at them girls with the daisy dukes on
Girl you really got it goin' on
Lookin' all nice 'n' sweet
So a ten and girl you're sick
I do like it a lot
When you showin' me a lil somethin' watcha got
Yo girls u be lookin' real cute
The way ya'll kickin' them daisy dukes"
Nothing kills a comment thread like the 69 Boyz!!!
Not just yet. :)