Misspelling my way to fame and fortune
Judging by the Google hits from the WordPress site, two of my biggest sellers were “Janet Jackon” and “Stonehedge.”
“Heh heh,” I thought, “stupid illiterate Googlers.” Until it dawned on me I had to be getting those hits because I had spelled those words that way. Which — duh — a search proved to be correct. I started to fix my mistakes, and then it occurred to me that the pool of websites serving the “Janet Jackon” community is a LOT smaller than the pool of websites serving the “Janet Jackson” community and I was closer to the top of it. Why throw away hits? And hits of such obvious high quality, as well.
This isn’t a new idea, capitalizing on sloppy typing. If you type drudge.com, you won’t get the Drudge Report but the Drudge Retort. I have a friend who was surfing once and tried typing the URL for the blog Biased BBC by hand. He got as far as “bi”, prematurely hit ENTER and Firefox sent him to bi.org — serving the world bisexual community since 1996. And now that it’s cached, he keeps accidentally renewing it.
At least, that’s what he says. Me, I get Behavioral Interventions when I do that. But, hey. I love you, man. You don’t ever have to explain yourself to me.
My one correctly spelled big seller was “boobies,” both of the “perky” and “droopy” varieties. So, I’m thinking…what if I misspell “boobies”? That’s got to be a pure, pharmaceutical grade Googlepalooza, right there.
Let’s start with Boobah — TV’s colorful, squeaky creeptastic pustules. Invented by Anne Wood, who also brought the world the Teletubbies, they too are aimed at under-fives and hallucinogenic drug users. Boobah are a continuation of the freaky fat-assed aliens theme, but without the Tubbies’ charm and obvious artistic merit.
Click the link. But stay away from the brown acid.
As opposed to buboes, which are swollen lymph nodes. They’re a common feature of many diseases, but they gave their name to the bubonic plague. In fact, Wikipedia says, in current epidemiological usage, if it ain’t got buboes, it’s not a plague. Bubonic plague was (almost certainly) the cause of my favorite pandemic, the Black Death.
My second favorite pandemic was the 1918 ‘Flu Pandemic, but that’s gotten so much press, what with the whole bird ‘flu thing. You know how you like something, and then it gets popular, and that ruins it?
In conclusion: boobys booobies boøbies boòbyes bubies bôôbeze bubize beubice boobease bübice b°°beez and boo!beas!
February 15, 2007 — 10:26 am
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