Many of you are familiar with my most notorious post, published on April 1, 2006. The meme which debuted in that post has never died despite the efforts of some cynics to kill it.
The story seems to have particularly fired the imagination of a very religious personage named David J. Stewart, whose essay here links to my piece. Each day, I receive at least a hundred hits from Stewart's site -- sometimes far more than a hundred. Stewart, it seems, gets an awful lot of traffic.
I've tried writing to Stewart, but he's not in a receptive mood.
I apologize to all of my web visitors that I will be unable to answer any e-mails, nor read any, for the time being.Can you think of a way to get a message through to the guy?
Incidentally, dear old Andy Breitbart -- on one of his "Big" sites -- once devoted a long thread to a discussion of Obama's authorship of the updated Communist Rules For Revolution. On April 1, 2011, Cannonfire told the whole horrifying story about Obama's youthful segue into the dark depths of Marxism. As some of you may recall, that post revealed that Obama's true parents were Alger Hiss and the daughter of the mysterious founder of the Nation of Islam. The Breitbartians accepted all of this without question. Alas, the discussion thread devoted to my reportage seems to have disappeared; if anyone can find that page again, I would be very grateful.
Finally: Some of you will recall this investigation of Hillary Clinton's links to the JFK investigation, published on April 1, 2008. That post seems to have inspired a genius named Captain Sherlock to write an online book titled "Lesbian Cults, Pedophile Oaths and Guild of Patented Hits." As you might guess from the title, it's a damned fine piece of journalism.
4 comments:
Thanks for the link!
You might be able to get rid of the unwanted traffic by dropping in a bit of code which makes it so that anyone clicking the link in the article on the high traffic site expecting to go to the article on your site ends up somewhere unexpected (you choose where, measured against your sense of humour and/or common decency).
Use at your own risk:
Javascript - http://javascript.internet.com/user-details/referrer-redirect.html
PHP - http://www.phpjabbers.com/redirect-based-on-referrer-or-ip-address-php2.html
Seth, I was hoping someone would have a suggestion like that. Thanks so much!
It sounds like Seth has the the type of solution you're after, but my first reaction during reading was: Why break the link? Instead, why not make the linked content even wackier?
I know you can post updates / addendums to previous posts; I assume the URL stays the same. You could always put a disclaimer in somewhere. So why not pad the post with even kookier content? Think of it as a social experiment: keep upping the Kook factor and monitor the traffic & comments from the linked site. What would be the straw that breaks the camel's back?
And another plus: a bad link doesn't get blamed on the linking site - no credibility erosion. On the flip side, a link to a crank post would undermine the linking site's reputation.
I can't place the source, but I read a comment once (from a name, not an internet moniker) basically saying that the most effective way to subvert an opposing viewpoint's credibility was to adopt the viewpoint yourself and act as it's proponent, focusing on it's most absurd premises (see: Stephen Colbert).
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