Is The Blogosphere Being Gamed?

When we first wrote up International Delete Your MySpace Account Day back on the 21st, it seemed like a small "ha ha, look what some blogger said! Isn't he cute?" story. Since then it has taken the tech blogosphere by storm, and it got me to wondering if we just all got "gamed".

It seems like I haven't been able to go two seconds in my RSS reader without seeing someone writing up their opinion over this one lone post that comes off more as a general rant of a random blogger than an actual movement. Sure, it's a cute idea, but should it be garnering the kind of attention it's receiving? Yes, it's been a relatively slow news week, and that's probably exasperated the situation, but it still was just a post with flawed logic.

Why has this flawed thinking gone so far as to warrant an official comment from MySpace? I do think Rebekah Horne, vice president of Fox Interactive Media and MySpace in Australia and New Zealand, made one of the most salient points with her comment that "This Delete-Your-MySpace day is just about being controversial." And this is where the "gaming" comes in that I mentioned earlier. It's almost as if Simon Owens, the original blogger has hit upon a formula of how to garner attention for anyone who would follow it:

1) Pick a popular target
2) Find reasons to nitpick something, even if they all have easy fixes
3) Say something outlandish about how it should go away
4) Reap the backlinks and media attention of "outraged" members of the blogosphere
5) Hit mainstream media as they always get amused when we dance like trained monkeys for them

Bloggasm AdMr. Owens would have more impact if so many of his "complaints" about MySpace didn't simply come off as whiny. About music playing every time you enter a page? There's a setting to stop that from happening. He says their advertising is obtrusive. Oh, you mean like putting ads in the body of a blog post? Coughs while pointing to the right for an example from the original author's blog post.

Even his valid points about the number of error messages on the site do not warrant this level of reaction. Fine, you don't like MySpace, just freakin' leave. Instead we have been treated to countless hours of wasted blogging by everyone saying why he's right or wrong, and meanwhile he can sit back and count all of the incoming traffic and undeserved attention he's garnering.

What concerns me more than anything is how many others will pay attention to what he did, how he did it, and the attention he got. How long until something similar happens with Facebook, YouTube, or any of the other big sites? Stop the cycle now folks before it gets out of control and we start repeating this whole pointless dance every few weeks.