Outsourcing Blogs

Our general business model is a two tiered effort to hire Chinese
citizens to write blogs en masse for us at a valued wage. …We estimate that our current blogforce
of 25 can support around 500 unrelated blogs…When a vendor
needs to promote a new product to the internet demographic we will be
able to create a believable buzz across hundreds of ‘reputable’ blogs
and countless message boards. We can offer a legitimacy to advertisers
that doesen’t exist anywhere else.

The second tier of our plan
is a blog vacation service where our employees fill in for established
bloggers who need to take a break from regular posting. As all bloggers
know, an unupdated blog is quickly forgotten. For a nominal fee we can
provide seamless integration of filler.

So far the enterprise is nothing more than a blog about starting the business.  But it does make for some amusing reading. 

Our initial results have been a little bit below what we expected.
To increase our authenticity we are trying to isolate and remedy
problem groups. Our design process centers around 3 general groups.
They are:

1.  Teenage girls
2.  Normal Bloggers (yuppies, moms, average college students)
3.  Super Bloggers (bipolars, cynics, liberals, outcasts, super-hip)

Teenage girls are apparently the easiest for Chinese sweat-shop workers to imitate but Super Bloggers are tough.  The entrepreneurs, however, have uncovered the formula:

To create convincing Group 3 product we need to have extensive
faux-archives (to give the illusion of a faithfully updated blog) and
we need to drop a lot of obscure pop-culture references. The key to
good Group 3 is to spend 80% being negative about certain areas of
culture and 15% excessively positive. The last 5% should be used for
self-loathing because the blogger likes certain ‘un-hip’ culture.

Yup, he got the percentages just about right.

Thanks to Noel Welsh, who claims he blogs at Untyping.