It takes some combination of a masterful writer and an obvious context to do sarcasm in writing. Inflection of voice that so easily communicates intent is mostly lost when it's just strings of letters. Some good portion of people figure this out after a few embarrassing misunderstandings in email when they first start using the new medium. Fortunately for me, I learned this on dial-up BBS's in the early 1980s. There are no archives of them for Google to find--I hope.

Still, there are some people who never get it. Or don't want to get it. They blithely go on sending out messages that they think are funny and their recipients get angry over. OK, I admit it. Sometimes it's me getting angry. But I think about it for a second, consider the alternate interpretations and give the benefit of the doubt. I don't begrudge these people because it's all too easy to type at the speed that you're thinking. Even a typo can wreck what you're trying to say.

The topic of this post is the third type of person, the one who knows well that a sarcastic message will be taken as serious. They see it as an opportunity to make fools of people. Mike Arrington, author of Techcrunch, ripped out just such a blog post earlier this week. One of his employees jumped for Facebook. It's completely understandable for a manager at a startup to lose an employee. I've been there more than once. So, I believe him when he plays out this bitter rant against Facebook, warning them to to lay off recruiting from his firm or else he'll start publishing negative articles about them. I figured out he was trying to be funny, but only after thinking about it for a while and reading the comments where Mike starts to make fun of people for being tricked.

Like I said, to pull this off you've got to be a masterful writer or you've got to have the right context. Mike is not a masterful writer, and while he's frequently amusing and entertaining, he's more of a straight man than a comedian. Techcrunch is a source of news about Web 2.0 companies. A similar post from Drew Curtis, who runs Fark, would be obvious as sarcasm.

I see this as a trick used frequently by political pundits. Say something mean and claim you were being sarcastic or ironic. It's not entertaining. As the author of a blog, it's a way to insult some of your readers. You should be providing a compelling service to all interested readers. Frederick's assertion on The Last Podcast that Techcrunch equals Valleywag is seeming more and more compelling to me.

More and more it seems making silly claims about one thing or another being dead or gone and then leaving it at that has become the common practice. There were three separate occurrences that made me cringe...

1 - I was reading the comments on a posting at engadget about parallel processing and one commenter said, "why would u need a personnel computer 100 faster than the fastest one out now". He was immediately thrashed and comparisons of 20 year old computers which are 10,000 times slower than today's palm pilots were used to show the poster's ignorance.

2 - I checked my feeds and saw a great post from Anil Batra discussing how it's in fashion to say things are dead in blogs and he referenced the posting from Nick Sharp at WebTrends who wrote about Web Analytics being dead. Anil went on to rightly say that web analytics is maturing and growing into a more well defined piece of the overall analytics toolbox, a much better and more accurate way of stating the obvious as opposed to Nick's shlocky salesspeak about how WebTrends is the first company to notice this and they're creating a new thing for people to buy to take advantage of it. Rubbish!

3 - One of our search specialists returned from the PPC Summit in NY last week and spoke about one of the presenters; he basically said that Web 2.0 was dead, or bullshit... As soon as I heard this I thought of a humerous parody about Microsoft's new Surface product, which is a top rated video on YouTube as well as already showing up 7th on natural search results when you google "Microsoft Surface", and it's only been posted for a week. As a "search guru" , marketing strategy expert or whatever his title is, you would expect him to be a bit more forward thinking since one of the core tennet's of web 2.0(UGC - User Generated Content) directly affects the field he's supposed to be an expert in. Web 2.0 involves users doing things on there own, immersive content and many other things, most of which are indexed and grow on the rankings based on people's opinions, which directly affects paid search, web analytics, banner advertising, negative keyword campaigns and everything else. Read Josh Ross's blog for an interesting perspective on Web 2.0.

These three examples are deeply intertwined, if we had stopped developing computer processors or hard discs because all of our current needs were being met then we would never have evolved into the internet overloaded society we have now...which happens to be a processing speed and disc space Goliath. And had the internet never evolved, we wouldn't have the newest iterations of usage and content sharing to measure and try to understand. The fact that these things continue to mutate and grow is main point, processor speed will never go out of style, growing and adapting the ways we measure online activity will never cease to change, because the way people use the internet and it's future incarnations will never cease to change.

The short version is that sticking your head in the sand can calling something dead, doesn't make it so...

1) Tom Peters on Short Writing

Back when I worked for Metaphor Studio in Cincinnati I did a lot of web site work for Tom Peters (uber-guru and author of In Search of Excellence). Back then I had never read any of his books, but since I was exposed to his content every day, one big concept stuck in my head: If you want to reach executives and other busy people, write in a way that can be quickly scanned and processed using descriptive sub-headings and short bullet points when possible. This writing strategy definitely makes me pay more attention to "Top 20 Whatever" articles they come across on my RSS feeds because I can quickly estimate how long it will take me to scan the article and get the basic points.

2) Tom Johnson on Blog Usability

One of the best "Top 20 Whatever" articles I've read recently is Tom Johnson's Twenty Usability Tips for Your Blog. These tips apply for personal and corporate blogs. Here's his list (without in-depth descriptions for the ultra-time strapped):

1. Pick a topic for your blog.
   
2. Encourage comments.
   
3. Make it easy to subscribe.
   
4. Include an About page.
   
5. Present your ideas visually.
   
6. Keep posts short and to the point.
   
7. Use subheadings for long posts.
   
8. Link abundantly.
   
9. Make headlines descriptive.
   
10. Archive by topic.
    
11. Include a list of related posts beneath each post.
    
12. Allow users to contact you offline.
    
13. Present your real viewpoint.
    
14. Write for your future employer.
    
15. Include a Top Posts section.
    
16. Provide an index.
    
17. Get your own URL and match it to your blog’s title.
    
18. Include a Recent Posts section in your sidebar.
    
19. Reward commenters for commenting.
    
20. Post often.

Thanks to Georgina Hibberd for posting about Tom Johnson on the University of Sydney's templatedata blog.

Since I'm an analyst by trade I started thinking more about measuring our blog's impact given our renewed focus on contributing more. I was initially surprised to see that last year Google had bought MeasureMap, one of the more interesting tools. However, 14 months later it remains a closed beta and has no recent info. In spite of this early setback I powered on to compile a list of the tools out there and a brief description of each.

MeasureMap - Google

- While it looks interesting and very Google-ish based on the screenshots, it's still in a closed beta and shows no signs of life right now.

StandardStats - Feedburner

- This used to be blogbeat, now it's split into a standard version which is free if you use feedburner, and it includes simple analytics. With a paid upgrade you get TotalStats, which is far more robust if you're willing to spend.

pMetrics - Performancing

- The free version is available to sites with less than 1K pageviews per day, but it does lack the power of the premium version, which is a very reasonable $15 per year. This is a very full-featured tool with a simple and intuitive web interface. Their demo is the actual stats for their site and they're live!

Mint - Shaun Inman

- A decently robust web analytics tool with some blog tracking built in, but this is more of a pretty face than a work horse. $30 per site.

BlogPulse - Nielsen

- This is a free service that can show general trends, much like Google Blog Search, but it has charts too.

Google Blog Search - Google

- This is a free service that can show general trends.

Technorati

- This is a free service that can show general trends and rankings for blogs.

What this shows is that the space is still pretty wide open, there are no clear leaders and most are probably waiting in fear for Google to deploy MeasureMap, which may or may not happen. But given the influence Google Analytics has had in the web analytics space they have reason to be scared of MeasureMap.

In the end I have come to the conclusion that pMetrics looks like the most bang for the buck... and it's the tool I want to deploy on this blog. Check back for updates on how it went and how it works.