Saturday, October 25, 2003
(7:06 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
We're Number One
Robb has enrolled adamkotsko.com in Blogstreet, the ultimate clearinghouse of blogology. He noted that he checked out InstaPundit, the number one most influential blog by their estimates, and found that it sucked ass. I agree. That's why my goal, starting now, is to have the absolute best #1 blog in the history of blogging, within one month's time.
The key is to get linked. I already have very valuable links from Jared Woodward and Melinda Minch, but some of the so-called "big names" in blogging don't appear to know I exist. I've posted about three comments a week on CalPundit, which is a pretty good stat given that he routinely gets over 100 comments each post, so I'm bound to get noticed and linked on that site. The real mother load, however, would be for Atrios to notice me. Thus, I'm going to comment like there's no tomorrow, with alacrity, zeal, savoir faire, and insight. I'm going to send him some heads-up messages:
Hey, Atrios -- love the site, man. Keep it up. You might know this already, but there's a new Krugman column up on the Times website, because it's Tuesday. They usually put it up around midnight Eastern time on the days it comes out, so I read it then. Just giving you some inside juice. Now please link to me. Love, Adam
Or how about this one:
Atrios, buddy -- I don't know if you already knew this, but Andrew Sullivan put up a new article on his site, from that British paper he works for. I thought you might be interested, because he's gay and conservative, which is kind of unusual. Now please link to me. Love, Adam
Pretty soon, Atrios would be linking to all kinds of cutting-edge stories and then giving me credit with such lines as "courtesy of attentive reader Adam Kotsko." He wouldn't realize that I was only using him in my relentless quest to get to the top of the blogging world! Before long, he would be a blogging backwater, while hundreds of commenters and fellow bloggers would be hanging on every word of The Weblog's dynamic duo (and maybe Michael Schaefer, contributor emeritus, would want to get in on the game more often, as part of his plan to become the Michel Foucault of Eastern European Studies). By the end of the month, InstaPundit would be in a panic coming up with half-assed defenses against my bullet-proof refutations of his half-assed so-called "ideas," and women everywhere would be studying up on cartoon shows from the late 1980s in a desperate gambit to get some attention from Robb.
That's when I'd reveal the Final Solution: a tip jar. We would far outpace Andrew Sullivan's pathetic blogging income of $80,000, which would give us the financial wherewithal to spend the entire rest of my life doing nothing but blogging. I would become one of the foremost popularizers of continental philosophy, while Robb's influence on the music world would be so great that bands would begin putting "blurbs" on the back of albums specifically to profit from his prestige.
We would get an inside track at Blogger's IPO and would become fabulously wealthy as the Democrat who got elected in 2004 (due to my overwhelming influence on political discourse) would get the deficit under control, give universal health care the old college try and fail miserably, and preside over a booming economy based on rampant speculation in the tech sector. I would become wealthy enough to have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, where I would eradicate war by linking to anti-war blog entries, selecting a particularly good quote, then writing "Indeed."
Finally, cut to me on my death-bed, in a grandiose but unfinished shell of a mansion -- before I expire, I mutter the seemingly incomprehensible word: "Rosebud." After a series of tedious interviews and flashbacks, a generic reporter character will come to some kind of banal conclusion, namely that even being king of the blogosphere was not enough to buy me love. Little did he know that I was talking about the ... Okay, yeah, this is dumb. The rest of my plan is going to work, though.
