Shameless

Do you know what these are?

1) jetblue flight attendant, 2) steve slater, 3) bleach episode 283, 4) lindsay sloane, 5) ind vs nz, 6) shanna mclaughlin, 7) parenthood, 8 ) dish network, 9) rachel bilson and, 10) portia de rossi.

Those happen to be the top 10 Google searches as of 30 minutes ago. You can look up the list of the top 20 anytime for an up-to-the-minute check of what's hot. I know you'll find this as shocking as I do, but some blogs and Web sites deliberately concoct stories using as many of those terms as possible, just to drive up traffic. This, for example, is from a Newsweek story about the Huffington Post, which "may have figured out the future of journalism."

While some HuffPo reporters do the old-fashioned work of going out and interviewing people, the job for a lot of HuffPo editorial staffers involves sitting at long tables in a big room in New York grabbing sexy stuff from other Web sites—photos of Leonardo DiCaprio shirtless, a video of a baseball player getting hit in the groin. Editors watch Google to see which search terms are hot at any moment, then craft stories that will show up in response to those searches. The stories might be written by a HuffPo staffer, or might be grabbed from some other site, or might be a mix of both. (About 40 percent of what HuffPo runs is stuff that originated somewhere else.) The trick is to design stories in such a way that they will get pushed toward the top of search rankings—a black art known as “search-engine optimization,” and an area in which HuffPo excels.

So this is the "future of journalism," a huckster who creates phony hit numbers by running fluff? That's all  it means when they admit to "crafting stories" that would show up "in response to those searches." ( 1) jetblue flight attendant, 2) steve slater, 3) bleach episode 283, 4) lindsay sloane, 5) ind vs nz, 6) shanna mclaughlin, 7) parenthood, 8 ) dish network, 9) rachel bilson and, 10) portia de rossi.) Heavens, that would be like newspapers trying to lure people in with crossword puzzles, sports, comics and advice columns in hopes they'd sit still for a little, news, too.

I'm not even sure how I'd go about crafting a story using, just to cite one example, ( 1) jetblue flight attendant, 2) steve slater, 3) bleach episode 283, 4) lindsay sloane, 5) ind vs nz, 6) shanna mclaughlin, 7) parenthood, 8 ) dish network, 9) rachel bilson and, 10) portia de rossi. Maybe I could start a rumor that the jetblue flight attendant was bailed out by lindsay sloane so she'd have someone to watch the ind vs. nz cricket match with on her dish network, but they got in a big fight (that temper!) because he wanted to watch an episode of parenthood while hanging out with shanna mclaughlin and rachel bilson. But that would just be pandering to the lowest common denominator, and I won't have it on this blog.