MY Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

Has it been a year already?

• Posted by MacStansbury on September 22nd, 2006 filed in John    

or

The first post Beth throws her cigarettes at the laptop

or

John explains the blogosphere

Back, last year:

Howdy. My name’s John, and I work here now.

Seriously.

I still have no idea how she did it, but she found my story about Conservative Bloggers Take Weekend Off, but she did. For a while, she’s been schooling me on how to suck, and now, I get the chance at the big time: sucking here, full-time!

Seriously.

Anyways, I’m the hired gun, if you will. I’m also the guy nobody’s heard of, but that’s not important. All you need to know, is that I’m the guy that writes the boring political crap that nobody ever comments on.

Oh, and I’m a man.

I promise not to suck from now on.

Oooooh how I wished that was true. From there I continued to suck, strait to the bottom of the TTLB, so thoroughly that I melted my own blog into oblivion. Well, that, and the American legal system. Don’t wanna talk about it.

But what you should understand is, this is my bittersweet goodbye from MVRWC, as I’m leaving to concentrate on other internetly interests, mainly involving an unnamed system I’m developing from scratch, and slacking. I’ve lost almost all taste for both politics and war, and blogs, for that matter, the bedrock of 99% of every post here. It’s just not me, anymore.

Okay, that 99% figure might be off a little. There needs to be like, 5-10% for 80s band videos or something. YouTube is such a two-edged sword.

When Beth first invited me to do all her work for her fill up blog space, I jumped at the chance, hoping to suck the MILLIONS of hits a day to my own crummy blog. Then, I proceeded to post maybe 10 links in a 12 month period. Not good blog-whoring, even with the tutelage from the master. It wasn’t what I thought it would be.

Then there was that whole “King of Cotillion” things. We won’t get into that. Just painful memories of bitter defeat at the hands of a guy who uses “Darth” in their title. How do you beat a Sith?

PRACTICE!

Badumching!

Okay, I’m babbling now. I tend to do that at times. Like, daily between 9 am and 3 am.

Part of my reasoning, also, for joining MYVRWC - which I convinced Beth would be easier if we used MVRWC, less typing you know - was that I had this desire to conquer the internets. It was just another step moving up in the blogosphere. And that’s when I started learning.

Want to know the mystery secret of owning the blogosphere? Here is the most honest, truthful, perfect way to supremacy in that TTLB. You can tell everybody you heard it here, first, people! And here’s the magic trick:

Be lucky.

That’s right, it’s all just pure luck. It isn’t being a hottie with a great rack, it’s not being a law professor from Tennessee, it’s not being a gay rights activist from USC…it’s all an un-planable crapshoot. There’s absolutely no way to guarantee success on your blog, regardless of who you are. Add to that, starting from anonymity in 2006 is completely different from the same thing in 2001.

To put it in perspective, there are over 5 million blogs out there, mostly dormant or splogs, and few of them get any appreciable traffic. The most successful blogs have some connection with a mainstream entity, whether it be a newspaper, radio, television station, or industry giant. The latest shining star of the blogosphere is a guy by the name of Glen Greenwald, a guy who primarily picks on FOX News’ Michelle Malkin and the like, the folks on top of the conservative blogosphere. How’d he get such good press, and notability? He’s selling a book through a major publisher; he’s got a built-in push that normal folks like you and me don’t have.

Which is all the more impressive what Beth did with the Cotillion. It’s a network of women bloggers, ones who wouldn’t have the Google Juice to get their voices heard, yet can combine their efforts to focus a great deal of attention to a subject. With no major backing from some university, media outlet, or PAC, this is as good as you could hope without making some major financial obligation.

There’s a couple of other efforts, like 9rules, that aren’t really closely connected, they’re really only connected by a look and a banner. You’ve got Pajamas Media, which is an advertising network, I think, put together for…some reason. That vague business model makes it hard to understand just what Pajamas Media does. You’ve got the most successful web networks, Gawker Media, which has always been clear about its paid-blogger blogs, and Weblogs, Inc., which was so good it got acquired by AOL.

What I’m trying to say is, you can be a great blogger, good as the day is long, and still have nothing in the Site Meter to show for it. Trust me, I know. After a couple of stabs at it, I realized the blogosphere wasn’t responsive to my threats of leaving, as people were to thinking they could make a ton of money off of it. One of reasons going to drop off the radar, is that I lost the will to play the game, the open trackbacks, the pligg, and the endless blogrolls. Somehow, these things were supposed to work, but no matter how many buttons I put up, the mad blog hits never came.

Here’s a little something written by my homie Sun Tzu, in his New York Times best-seller, Just Give Me The Damn War:

Sun Tzu said: The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.

To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.

Thus the good fighter is able to secure himself against defeat, but cannot make certain of defeating the enemy.

Hence the saying: One may know how to conquer without being able to do it.

For about three years, I’ve worked hard at doing something I hate: selling myself. It was something John Hawkins said the other day (not about boobies), about selling ads. To paraphrase, he was willing to compromise some of his beliefs in order to sell an ad to something he didn’t inherently believe in. That’s something I’ve done, but I don’t want to do anymore.

And just for fun, here’s a bonus, super-magical way to get thousands of hits to your website: buy $2,000 worth of Google AdSense ads. In fact, advertise almost everywhere you can find. That’s what MySpace did, and look at where they are. The rumor was that this one guy made up the site, and all these cool people showed up. First of all, it was made by a marketing company, and the pages and activity were part of paid endorsements.

If you’ve paid any attention to who I’ve linked (and I’ve linked a lot), you’ll see a consistent thread. They are good writers or finders of news. They’ve added to the story, or been the first to break it. They are the aggregators and the pundits. To borrow a line from probably Lawrence Simon, they are the thinkers and linked.

Sweetness & Light, Gateway Pundit, Princess & VC, it’s not like their material isn’t great, it’s just that you’ll never catch them on top of the Technorati Top 100. It’s a shame, and completely predictable, that blogs are judged by link count. But that’s how it works; notoriety is more important than ability. That’s what bugs me most about a lot of things.

Tonight I’ll be gutting my politics feeds, concentrating on learning my php voodoo spells, and finally relax, assured that somewhere, out there in this big old world, somebody is arguing with somebody else over something of life and death importance, while I’m playing Madden on my XBox. I’m sure the blogs will get along fine without me.

And it’s not like I’m burning my key, or anything, I’m just going into extended hiatus. That’s what you say when you want to leave people when you want them to think you’re coming back, just in time to save the paper from going under. I totally promise this isn’t like that one episode of the Simpsons where they vote out the garbage commissioner, and put Homer in charge, and after he nearly destroys the town, they vote to bring him back, and he goes up the microphone and starts laughing at them for the mess they got into, then leaves.

I would never do that.

Promise.

Honest.

It’s been a fun, exciting, maddening year here, and I’ll miss it all. Sort of.

Except for the maddening part.

And now, I leave you with my theme song:

And, yes, I know it’s Art of War. Just making sure you were paying attention.