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.