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12/10/2003 Entry: ""Miserable failure" google bomb"
I'm a great admirer of the work done by the Truth Laid Bear in tracking and "mapping" the strange blog universe. The ecosystem is both geninely useful and a bit of fun too. Even so, I don't very often find myself agreeing with the ursine Californian. Today I discovered something on which we have common ground
The latest prank making the rounds in the weblog world is an effort to ensure that a Google search on "miserable failure" turns up pages on George Bush ... So far, it seems to be working rather well.I almost blogged something to that effect myself the other day and couldn't quite get the words to come out properly. I'm no fan of GWB's, but the google thing seemed childish and pointless to me. More than that, it's an act of vandalism on a tool that almost every web user in the world finds useful. So thanks to N. Z. Bear for putting it so clearly.I think I can credibly claim to have functional sense of humor, but I just don't see much funny about this particular joke. All too often, people delude themselves into thinking that if they keep repeating a falsehood over and over again, it will come true: and here we see that philosophy taken to its logical conclusion. Nevermind argument and reason: let's just say it's true, and that's sufficient.
There is something fundamentally wrong about weblogs being used to such a purpose: in a medium which allows anyone to express their own ideas and logic, this isn't an argument: it's just a rude noise. Using your weblog to hack Google like this is like using a master's paintbrush to scrawl obscene graphiti on the bathroom wall. Sure, you can do it, but aren't there better uses for the instrument?
