Blogebrity is obviously a fake, but even though that that is fairly widely known, it still spreads. A magazine that launches it’s site as part of a competition to create the best meme, where the only content not ‘coming soon’ is a list of the people most likely to help drive this particular meme, bloggers, oh cummon. The wonderfully sarcastic strapline, worthy of Andrew Orlowski “isn’t it about time that someone talked about bloggers” will make any blogger gullible enough to believe it, regret having been so vain.
Regardless of the scam, Blogebrity is really, really interesting: it’s a weblog with ZERO content which has grown faster than almost any other.
This is not a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes, here the Emperor knows he is naked but the people cannot see it.
Strip away the graphics and rearrange the content and what do you have:
A two column weblog where the main content column is a sign that says coming soon, a site that will treat bloggers like celebrities and the right hand column is a blogroll.
The blogroll is cheekily ranked A, B or C list, mixed around just to encourage some scuffles and put a few noses out of joint but whose sole purpose is to feed off vanity, rather like people who obsess about their Technorati ranking or join the line outside the nightclub that has the longest line and the snottiest door policy.
But the most interesting thing about Blogebrity is that although it has the highest number of inbound links of all the Contagious Media Showdown entries, it does not have the highest traffic.
Blogebrity is an interesting experiment to see if you can create a viral meme where there is almost no information payload within the replicator by making it highly attractive to potentially contagious hosts, a ‘headline only’ meme. It seems that this extreme does not work as well as a ‘full content’ meme, i.e. it has infected the web (with more links that any other entry) but not people’s minds (lower page views). But it does work surprizingly and depressingly well, who knows, it might actually be worth putting some content up and creating a real site out of it after all – providing it still keeps its tongue in its cheek.
Contagious Media entry rankings.
The virtual line outside of the Blogebrity nightclub.
tags: [memes]
permamark in: Wists