As I obliquely mentioned a few posts ago, I’ve started a new blog, over at gumbaby.com, which looks at the moment like it will become central to my dissertation.
The focus is on a phenomenon which has plagued me here at the DSWJ (and plagued Christine over at Sushiesque) for quite some time: people arriving at a blog, apparently failing to read the post, missing the point of the blog, and commenting anyway. My principal aim is to keep track of as many comment threads like these as I can (as well as guestbooks, forums, and possibly even emails, as commenters seem to make little distinction between all of these), so as to eventually analyze them. So if you see threads like these, please send them my way.
So far the patterns have been kind of mind-blowing. Most of these people are looking to contact celebrities or other notable figures (I have a few coming down the pike about some of the world’s ten richest people). They are seeking acknowledgement, advice, or sometimes even financial or business assistance. They are overwhelmingly female. There are, as might be expected, a huge percentage which seem to be written by young kids, but there’s plenty by adults as well.
As was suggested to me by someone who worked at Blogger, they really don’t understand what text boxes are for. This is evidenced not just by the fact that they sometimes seem to think they’re sending email when they post, but also the number of people who write “what is this for?” or “I don’t know what this is” in text boxes accompanying the comment box which ask them to enter their email address or a URL.
I should maybe explain that the comments I am posting are quite distinct from comment spam. Comment spam tends to be automated and repetitive, to not make much linguistic sense, and to be aimed at selling something. Gumbaby comments, by contrast, are generally spelled poorly (but otherwise make semantic and syntactic sense), written as if from one person to another, and feature a plea for help or recognition. I’m not featuring comment spam on the Gumbaby blog, but anything hand-typed by a person not looking to sell something is just fine.
Beyond merely collecting comment threads like these, I have the more ambitious goal of actually redirecting traffic from threads like these to a special site (not yet built) which would collect a little information about the commenters in order to learn more about their demographics and their Internet habits. To that end, I plan to make a badge or banner which bloggers can put on the offending page. If you have a gumbaby thread somewhere on your blog and would be willing to stick a banner reading “CELEBRITY EMAIL ADDRESSES” (or something else related to the hijacked topic) in the post, let me know.
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My job is currently following a related path: recently I developed a video for work about critical literacy skills on the Web. Yes, my job has me photoshopping pictures of octopi into trees. It’s pretty sweet. I’m also blogging quite a bit for work, if you’d like to keep up over there. The DSWJ is still having some growing pains, so at the moment things will be a little quiet here.
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