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Saturday, August 20, 2005

Blog posts for a price

I sympathize with Ambivablogger's plaint about feeding her site:
It all becomes equally semi-shallow, as I suppose it would for a newspaper reporter churning out lots of copy on deadline. You don't gather force. There isn't a rhythm to it, with rest. The blog is a succubus. Its demand feels relentless, like if you don't keep performing and entertaining, the crowd will quickly wander off. There are so many other good acts to watch.
Luckily, Old Horsetail Snake has a solution:

Yesterday I allowed as how I was gonna bail out Internet b**ggers who got writer's cramp from goin' brain dead. Part of my plot to Make My Pile is to secretly substitute for these people with some topical topics. For a price.

Some Internet writers find they got nothin' interesting to say so they rely on formula pap, like "Uninteresting Things in My Junk Drawer," or "What We Had at Burger King." Instead of that, they can hire Ol' Hoss, the Master Internet Double. They give me their user name and password and I will tap into their site and post some spellbinding stuff in their name. Nobody will be the wiser, except me and the poor sap who is payin' me.

Here are the categories in which I am offering services:
  • Gardening: Types of Fish to Use in the Corn Row
  • Child Rearing: The Kids Were So Cute Today
  • Child Rearing: Did I Really Give Birth to These Monsters?
  • Comedy: Bad Jokes and Good ($5 off if permitted to use the F-bomb)
  • Vacations: Without Gnats, $30; With Gnats, Free
  • Rants: Any Subject Except George Bush, who needs no help making himself look like an asshole
  • Walmart: That Bitch in Aisle 3 Never Watches Where She's Going
  • Weird Science: Which Came First, the Opossum or Lois Lane
  • Man-Eating Sharks: List of Stomach Contents, Alphabetical Order
  • Movie Reviews: (This piece will be free, because Ol' Hoss does not go to the movies. All movie reviews will say: "This stinks. Don't go to the movies and you'll never see another bad one.")
The cheapest standard pot-boiler I got is "Blogger Ate My Piece Again Today."

The line forms to the left.

Along the same lines, Museum of Hoaxes pointed to the new Blogoriented.com. Extracts:
What Jeff and I are doing is simple but as far as I know we are the first. We are outsourcing blogs to China.

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 for these original blogs is to generate a steady stream of revenue...

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 unupdated blog is quickly forgotten. For a nominal fee we can provide seamless integration of filler...

I have been working hard trying to help Jeff make our product more believable. Our initial results have been a little bit below what we expected ... Our design process centers around 3 general groups:
  1. Teenage girls
  2. Normal Bloggers (yuppies, moms, average college students)
  3. Super Bloggers (bipolars, cynics, liberals, outcasts, super-hip)
I can tell you that the top 5 blogs we are currently developing are:
  • A blog written from the perspective of a stray cat in NYC.
  • A blog written from 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.
While these are not yet ready for public consumption you would be amazed how good this stuff is. Our most talented guy keeps writing about how the weatherman got his forecast wrong and is sad.

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2 Comments:

At 10:33 AM, Blogger kenju said...

A funny, tongue-in-cheek post (I hope it is tongue-in-cheek). I read what Amba wrote on her blog - but I had not thought to connect it to Hoss's previous comments.

Carmi Levy has a post today about blogs becoming newspaper columns:
http://writteninc.blogspot.com/

 
At 6:51 PM, Blogger amba said...

Well, I'm signin' up for ol' Hoss's service. And I'm not saying when. See if anybody can tell the difference! :)

 

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