Man...this rain, this rain, this rain.
It feels like March out there. Luckily the weather for the weekend is supposed to be a little nicer. I've been taking percoset, but it doesn't seem to do a damn thing for my back pain. However, it's giving me a nice dizzy feeling that sort of puts me five inches inside my eyes.
DC is a small town and like any small town there's always petty infighting and backbiting, and this fact is true of the blog world just as it's true of the real world. Blogs with no readers (such as myself) don't have to worry about the whole scene, but the ones that get mentioned in the Express and elsewhere form sort of an insular coterie of log-rollers, name droppers, and occasional back stabbers.
Take DCist for instance. It's a good general purpose local blog that highlights the local arts scene, recaps local political issues (e.g. the stadium giveaway), and occasionally delves into cooking. It also has a large number of links along the lefthand side to blogs of local interest, like DCeiver. All in all, DCist is an innocuous site that provides a broad community forum.
So a few weeks ago, near Cinco de Mayo actually, this other blogger, whose main claim to fame is his association with the Washington Socialites, writes an article ragging on DCist. It probably would have gone largely unnoticed except for the pre-publication pronouncements he was making on other sites, to the effect that he was going to "drop the hammer" on DCist. Well, DCeiver laid into him good on his site and demonstrated clearly that DCB bit off more than he could chew.
Or did he? With that post, DCBachelor went from having almost no traffic on his site (hey, I sympathize) to being the topic of conversation on blogger sites that ripped into him. So if your goal is to increase your visibility and gain traffic, I'd say DCB maybe bit off all he intended.
But really, to attract attention for being spiteful is one thing; to turn that negative attention into love and kisses is quite another, which is why his next move was so genius. He went on other blogs and made conciliatory gestures, mainly consisting of comments that could lead to a belief that "hating" was a pose, an attitude toward life that was all in jest and could be shed like last year's fashions (speaking of which, the dude wears a soul patch. ouch.). And as the coup de grace, he invited friend and enemy alike out to a "Haters Happy Hour." Fucking brilliant. DCBachelor managed to become a central player in a small blogging lovefest that includes the CPMC, the Washington Socialites, and their adjuncts (cpjl, v, butterfly network, etc.). I'm not saying he's won over all his critics, but the main point is that he have to spend any more Saturday nights wondering why the phone isn't ringing.
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