This blog is no longer being updated. I've moved on to The Accidental Weblog. Hope to see you there.

Friday, January 21, 2005

Building the perfect meme

So Atrios and friends have their 'Friday cat blogging'. Bob Harris has his 'pudu blogging'. Rox Populi does the unchained MP3 player thing every week now...

Seems to me, I need a weekly schtick for this blog. Something largely content-free, whimsical, and either (a) infectious as a meme, or (b) tending to encourage almost criminal misuse of image composition/retouching techniques.

Currently, however, I'm having trouble choosing. Right now, I've got as possibilities:
  • Friday sex toy blogging. Yes, it justifies the text in the subtitle which, sadly, has been pretty much false advertising from the beginning (who'd a thought I'd have so much trouble finding entertaining sex toy stories to comment upon on a regular basis), but, let's face it, I'd probably go from whimsical to tasteless somewhere in the middle of the first sentence of the first installment. So I'm not so sure about this one. But I'll keep it in mind as a backup plan, to be used shamelessly to pander for audience share, in the event all else fails... Sorta like the networks do.
  • Friday cryptographic algorithm blogging. Pretty much the opposite end of the spectrum from Friday sex toy blogging. Advantages: probably an underserved market. Disadvantages: I'll probably really have to reach to give it any kind of sex appeal. And I'd probably run out of algorithms after about a year. Which, I suppose, would probably be a relief by then anyway.
  • Friday drunken comment blogging. This is a natural, insofar as I do usually have a beer or two at lunch with colleagues most Fridays, and, most Fridays, someone, in the atmosphere that prevails at such events, says something pretty entertainingly silly and/or incriminating. Advantages: probably kinda entertaining, for a few of you, anyway. Disadvantages: will probably rapidly decay to a series of entirely too obscure and self-referential in-jokes, funny to, at the very most, about five people worldwide. Granted, this might be more than the readership of this blog, but there's no particular reason to expect it's going to be the same five people.
  • Friday hangover cure blogging. A public service. But let's face it, there are really only two that work. We'd get one week of (i) 'drink lots of water beforehand', and one week of (ii) 'and don't drink so much booze, dumbass', and we'd be done.
  • Friday cure for the common cold blogging. Non-starter. Two weeks less material than the above.
  • Friday pointless consumer garbage blogging. I like this one. Probably less content-free than is the norm for such things, but I expect I'd never run out of material. Sharper Image alone might keep me going for years (witness, for an example, the "World's First Truly Silent & Efficient Watch Winder")... Of course, they'd probably sue me.
  • Friday freaky spam blogging. I get a lot of freaky spam. So there's never gonna be a shortage of material. From the various weird religions prosyletizing into the Infidels accounts I monitor, to the endless pitches for 'herbal Viagra' and the like (which, if I knew less about the net, I might take more personally), it's a never-ending tapestry. But on the down side, like the sex toy idea, the potential for tastelessness is pretty high. And probably most of you have already seen said spam too.
Anyone reading this, do let me know your preference. And do feel free to propose something else. I live to serve.