Well, I am getting down to the end of Gonzo Marketing (book by Chris Locke, aka rageboy), and I must say this has been an eye opening experience when it comes to looking at blogs (and some of the other things I am working on). It is a bit of a tale, but let me tell you what I got out of all of this.

First and foremost, Locke tries to paint the picture of the internet as a sort of great social commune of people sharing interests, creating geocities websites filled with dancing hamsters and talking about organic gardening. He touched just barely on the new at the time idea of weblogs, which we all know now as blogs. He correctly did predict that we would all spend out time talking to each other in little personal interest sites. Everyone is a writer, and editor, and a researcher. We all bring our personal experiences and knowledge to the table, and away we go, filling the web with endless amounts of wonderful, insightful personally slaved over and loved information.

That much, my friends, he got right.

He goes on to attempt to sell this concept to industry as a “gonzoâ€? or underground marketing campaign. Basically, unleash your employees to create personalized websites about whatever interests them, and attempt to leverage that into some sort of sneaky personal brand connection concept. It is a stunning abuse of the very trust he seeks to promote in the wide open social commune that he calls the net. It is a bit like sending in undercover spies or some sort of digital trojan horse. Pollute and corrupt the system from the inside.

Thankfully, that sort of bloated neo-corporate blather for the most part has been lost in the sea of the web, because people are not so easily tricked by the bullshit of forced originality. It is a very well known fact that most blogs are abandoned within a few posts of being opened, as most people discover that they really have very little to say. Attempting to force employees to talk about whatever for fun and corporate prodfits is an even bigger non-starter, and as a result, most of what was in Gonzo Marketing regarding personal interest websites has pretty much failed.

In it’s place, we find things like myspace and any number of pathetic dating sites packed full of losers hiding behind fake photos and even faker profiles. In both cases, the goal seems only to score the most “friendsâ€? and not to actually talk about anything. A personal grandstanding and very shallow shout outs, totally transient in nature. For most of these people, the net is just a glorified school dance or pickup bar with smaller drink tabs and no reason to dress up.

Those who do chose to blog come in a couple of groups. The best bloggers tend to be the professionals that you actually want to know more about. I personally love to read Matt Cutt’s blog (he is a higher end Google guy, double meaning intended). It is filled with great information about how Google runs, things going on, and the weird things that Matt really enjoys. It is a real mish-mash, but good fun overall and not at all forced in language or subject.

In the middle area there are hundreds of thousands of people who ruin personal blogs on about every subject in the world, from anthills to zits and everything in between. Some of these are well written by people who have some skill and a real interesting point of view or passion for a subject, and others are just hack jobs from people who can barely string together a sentence. There is a ton of passion in these sites.

There is also the commercial blog. I run some of those ( like The Little Tit site or DDCup Big Booby Blog ) that are aimed to provide a service and inform a group of like minded people about things they might like. My personal preference in breast size doesn’t come into play here, I professionally write from either point of view without issue, as I understand both, and they are darn good information and resource sites that visitors tend to enjoy. Over time I open more sites of the same general concept, reaching out to people with similar desires or pleasures. It is actually one of the most fun parts of my day to work on these sites.

Finally, there are the blog mega sites, like stile project or consumption junction that were bloggy type sites really before blogs existed. They are sort of the all things to all people, and are quite popular for various reasons.

What Locke failed to address in his book was the issue of integrity and truthfulness in blogging. It is very easy to write almost anything in a blog (My sister is an alien) without anything being able to check out the facts (nobody can prove she is an alien, now can they). The web is filled with blogs that lie, steal, cheat, and mislead’ and that what keeps the blog world from being anything more than a poorly organized social experiment.

Let me give you an example. There are any number of “celebâ€? blogs out there, chatting about the latest gossip, often posting nipple slip pictures, embarrassing moments, and shots that are pretty darn funny. These sites get huge numbers of visitors every day, and they tend to try to sell people off to celeb nudity sites like Mr Skin or similar sites.

Every wonder where they get those pics from? Simple: THEY STEAL THEM.

Every wonder where these sites get their funny videos from? Do you think they have film crews all over the world chasing stupid drivers and dumb skateboard riders around? Nope’ THEY STEAL IT.

Now, consider this: If they are willing to steal material to fill their sites, would you consider that they might be a little bit fast and loose with facts too?

Nobody is checking nobody knows.

If you get your news from blogs, then you probably dont have all the truth just be careful, okay?

Okay, so I am not done re-reading this book, but I have just gotten to the point where I put it down the last time… and now I remember why.

Chapter 7: The Gonzo Model

Okay, I was following along no problem. Chistropher Locke is certainly a motivated and strong speaker, and believes very much in what he writes. He is a, umm, how can I say this, real born again evanglist when it comes to this idea of Gonzo Marketing. Religeous in approach, even. He prays at the alter of the little guy, lighting a candle for the micro interests that all of us apparently have. Left handed red head football lovers from WallaWalla, short people with big chips on their shoulders about global warming and the effects on the one eyed slugs of bimini island… everyone has a candle lit at the alter of Locke.

I was good with that. Blogs and free blog space and myspace and 100 other sites have given the public a space to post whatever the heck is they want, regardless of the truth, skill, or intelligence of the people using it – the only barrier being smart enough to figure out the interface and type your name (and if you have ever spent time around places like blogger, you will know that many, many people just don’t past that test). There are literally thousands if not millions of totally useless, undeveloped, abandoned blogs and personal web pages crowding up the net universe. Heck, you can’t blame people for trying, I am proud of anyone willing to give it a shot.

Locke prays every day that another blog will appear, that another micromarket will be born, and that the world will be all right.

I start reading this magic chapter 7, and it all goes to shit.

All of sudden, the book takes a sharp turn and we are back inside stuff cubicle packed offices, instructing bosses to set up personal websites inside the company and let the employees play… and then pick the best and put them REALLY on the web and use them as a sneaky, back ass way to get your company exposed, all while tricking employees into being secret sales droids… never realizing that their posts and articles on back yard gardening are in fact a covert way of sneaking your company into the very micromarkets that your employees have spawned for you.

There you have it: The high priest of do it yourself web teaching companies how to corrupt the system and turn it into, well… shit.

Gonzo Marketing is in fact the first step down the road not of blogs, but of micromarket splogs generated not by computer and keywords lists, but carefully created and maintained by the ignorant employees who think that they are putting one over on the company by spending their time working on a blog instead of answering customer phone calls or actually doing work.

He calls it “winning through worst practices” but in the end, after 6 chapters of spewing off how important the new non-broadcast media would be in people’s lives, he turns around and tells companies exactly how to corrupt it and turn it back into a form of broadcast medium… instead of 100 people working to produce a TV show, just give each one of them a couple of blogs to run and you suddenly have access to 200 new micromarkets…

I guess I am just a little disgusted – and all of this from a guy who’s website looks like the very worst of myspace and yahoo groups tossed in a blender, fed to an incontenant monkey, and given 12 hours to filter through.

Anyway, I am going to plug on through and try to get to the end of this book, all the while trying not to laugh at the quaint 5 year old information that it spews.

Okay, let me start off with the link to the story: College guys go wild

There are two trends growing, and honestly, I don’t know which one is worse. This story brings both of them out.

Reality porn started a few years back with sites like bangbus and Mike’s Apartment showed girls getting picked up and “talked into” being on a porn video. In the case of Bangbus, the real trick was at the end they never actually paid the girl the money they promised, and often tricked them into getting out of the van and then driving away. Think of it as a simpistic version of male dominance, on tape and sent out to millions of other potential knuckle dragging cavemen to enjoy.

From my point of view, taken as a humorous aside in life, they are actually really a bunch of fun and play to a harmless fantasy that most people would never even consider thinking about. It sort of plays off the older “pick up a hitchiker”thing, a pretty normal fantasy that has been around since the start of my life, anyway. I will tell you that you probably would enjoy checking out the bangbus trailers because some of them are truly classic pieces of porn humor. Taken in a light hearted manner, some of them are truly side splitting.

Mike’s Apartment is a twist. Guy puts ad in newspaper for temporary room mates for his flat in Amsterdam. A parade of poor students, cheap travellers, and confused locals come through looking for a space to stay, and when they findout that the price of admission is getting naked on camera (and often fucking the mythical “mike”) some run and some strip down and get busy. Again, sort of the stranger fantasy played out well.

The downside of these reality sites is that some people have taken them a little too far, pushing the border of subjects like non-consentual sex and even rape. One of the weirder and less enjoyable sites included ideas like “attacked while sleeping” and “she’ll never know” type sites. This delves into an area that starts to work on matters of judgement and good taste. There are thing, example, that a married couple might do for fun (I will even admit to waking my ex-wife up with some nice munching, which lead to amazing sex) but most of these sites play on “neighbors”, “room mates”, or “sister’s friends”. It is the idea of having sex without waking someone up… and it is, without a doubt in my mind, the portrayal of non-consentual sex, which is rape.

Rape ain’t good, guys.

Anyway, these dumbasses in the article happened to find a buddies’ almost conquest passed out in the living room of their shared flat, and decided after watching some porn that it would be a good idea to blow their load all over her while she slept. Not cool at all.

Guys, if the girl can’t say yes or no, the answer should always be NO.

Anyway, the other trend in all of this is the current run of the press to blame porn for every ill in society. When that Entwhistle dude that killed his wife and kid was caught, they checked his computer and foudn that he was checking out porn and hanging around adult dating / sex exchange sites. Some of the media tried to suggest this as some sort of trigger for what happened. The truth of the matter is that more than 50% of all americans check out porn and enjoy it at one time or another, and that visiting an adult site isn’t exactly unusual or out of place. Only the taboos and morals of the current society keep us from standing around the water cooler at work talking about the fuck movie we watched last night. Porn star girls and guys are well known, most people know who is who. It isn’t a big deal, we don’t talk about it.

So my advice to the media is that you start looking somewhere else for a scapegoat… and guys, keep your dick in your pants when the girls don’t want it. That will keep us from having too many more articles that make the porn business look bad, okay?