Britannica Blog Link-Baits from Google to Copyright/P2P to Kids Today

I must confess I'm fascinated by Britannica Blog's Link-Bait experiment. Now the topic's on about Google, copyright, plagiarism, and those rotten kids. It's like someone sat down with the A-list Blogger's Playbook, and asked the question "How do we make this gimmick work for us?"

Someone seems to have thought to themselves: "OK A-lister, you say that in order to prosper in this brave new media world, the thing to do is become a talk-radio type flamefest. There should be lots of ranting against The Enemy, and lots of stroking of the audience that they're the bestest ever. We can do that. You didn't invent snark, we had snottiness a long time ago. Except we won't do it in terms of the anti-pointy-headed-intellectual shtick that you favor, but apply it to a besieged-culturalist routine that appeals to our audience."

I still can't figure out if they've been corrupted even as they outbait the baiters, or whether they've shown the upstarts how it's really done.

See http://blogs.britannica.com/blog/main/2007/06/the-siren-song-of-the-internet-part-ii/

Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog (Wikipedia, Google, censorware, and an inside view of net-politics) - Syndicate site (subscribe, RSS)