Most bloggers don't think about it, but they have some amount of power. Even low-traffic blogs like mine have some.Consider this: back in January when the iPhone was announced, I expressed my techno-lust in a blog post entitled "phonegasm".
Fast-forward to the present, and notice that if you to a google image search for the word "phonegasm", the first page of results has several pictures that have appeared on my blog: an anvil being blown into the air in Seward, my cat fabio, a map of the Quad State Trail Project, a picture of the Eric Johnson stratocaster, and a picture of Vint Cerf presenting an award to my old team -- all of these images, strongly associated with the word "phonegasm" in Google's page ranking, just because I was moved to gush about the reinvention of the phone.
If you don't think that's power, then consider today's interesting story, brought to my attention by Fake Steve Jobs, about Microsoft paying bloggers to write about the phrase "people ready". Their goal, apparently, is twofold: 1) to install the "people ready" meme into the heads of pointy-haired buzzword-propagating, purse-string-holders, and 2) to make web searches for the phrase "people ready" guide them, like cattle over the bridge-of-sighs, towards microsoft.com.
Step 4 would, of course, be "Profit!!!11!!", and step 3 something like ??????
You should be able to see where they're going with this. Brace yourself for a bajillion ads featuring the song People Get Ready by the Impressions. If you need to be reminded of that song, here's a nice instrumental guitar version played by Jeff Beck (more, and more).
So what what does "people ready software" mean to me? I would say that MacOS X and the iPhone are the current state of the art. Watch the videos of how the user interface works. Nothing is more people-ready than that. Not even the oPhone.
What does it mean to you? The wikipedia entry is wide open for contributions.
Thank you, Fake Steve, for the entertainment. Thank you, Real Steve, for people ready software. Tangential thanks to Fake Steve Ballmer for being funny, and to Fake Bill Gates for being interesting. (I hope that your prediction for Friday comes true.) The fake blogger phenomenon appears to be asploding. Just like fake people-ready software and fake, paid blog opinions.
P.S. I might be willing to change my tune and fellate a micro, soft member for a negotiable price. After all, the iPhone comes out on Friday and I need to be able to buy my way out of my current contract.
Have your fake people talk to my fake people.
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