This blog is a (much!) less-than-formal outlining of recent travels, events, happenings, thoughts and comments which tend to have some occupational relevance, but are on occasion nothing more than a means of passing the time while waiting for trains, planes & automobiles...

Sunday, 25 April 2010

Ian-PWL (whoever he is) says this blog is wonderful!

The secret's out: how to make any blog appear to be one of the most popular on the Internet, even if it only averages half-a-dozen visits a day (assuming there's no visitor counter like the one on the right).
Just after each posting, leave a comment underneath saying how brilliant it is. Something along the lines of “Fantastic: particularly the headlines with puns in them!”, or possibly "A must read - absolutely fascinating. 5 Stars!!" will do. Then go comment on every other blog you can find and write that they are boring, and perhaps written by morons/idiots/lunatics/etc.

This, according to a BBC news report (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8641515.stm), is approximately the strategy employed by the historian Orlando Figes (a professor at London's Birkbeck College and the author of many books on Russian history) to boost his ratings. Apparently he's been leaving comments like "hard to follow" and "awful" under the Amazon entries of the printed works of rivals, and oozing praise about his own efforts. Unfortunately, there were Baldrickesque flaws in his cunning plan, as not only did he use the ill-disguised pseudonym “orlando-birkbeck”, Rachel Polonsky - one of the authors rubbished by Figes - discovered that the reviewer shared the same home address as the good professor. Oops!

Figes said he was "ashamed" of his behaviour and did not entirely understand why he acted as he did, adding that "it was stupid".
No arguments here!

No comments:

Post a Comment