The Short Humour Site









Home : Writers' Showcase : Submission Guidelines : A Man of a Few More Words : Links

Writers' Showcase

The Philosophy of Shouting
by Roger Pattison

If I knew what I was doing (re: internet-things) I am told (mostly by people I’ve never seen in my life) that I should put a reference to the TITLE, VERY EARLY IN A BLOG. (No I haven’t accidentally put the ‘caps lock’ on; that was meant to be SHOUTED.) And then there are all sorts of other folks telling me about H1 and H2 and H3, none of which convey anything at all. I know a bit about the H-bomb, and I don’t like that at all, so I imagine that I don’t like the other ‘H’s’ either.

This is where we get to the PHILOSOPHY OF SHOUTING.

The point I make is this. If I know about SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION, and VERTICAL SEARCHES, and HORIZONTAL SEARCHES (you lay down for them) and SEAWARD-SKYWARD SEARCHES (I just made them up), then, without knowing anything else at all (in other words being a vacuous old git; so what’s new?) I could disseminate this absolute dearth of brain activity to millions. And much good might it do them.

On the other hand (that’s the one I have my jam sandwich in) if I happened to be the possessor of the Infinite Clue, the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything; and put it on my blog, the chances are that my dog might get a read of it. Eventually. That’s if my dog could read and if I had one.

I don’t actually see much difference between knowing the ins and outs of the processes of promotion on the internet, and SHOUTING. How can I put my point more succinctly?

Let’s say we have two perfectly reasonable human beings sat next to each other on their little computers. That might be a problem depending on the day. Monday is a bad day to look for these two perfectly reasonable human beings, as they are outnumbered by an astronomic number of unreasonable ones. Friday would be a better day. Let that go. We will, however unlikely, have found two perfectly reasonable human beings to sit in front of two perfectly reasonable computers.

The first one (who we will call Dufrace Moribund, for no good reason actually) writes on his computer: I AM VERY GOOD SO PAY ME A LOT OF MONEY. He then gets all his tags right, employs SEO websters and all the other stuff, and gets paid millions per click. So far as I know.

On the other hand (at this time free, because I’ve been eating my jam sandwich) Fountainburg Slurry has just invented a matter transporter that can be built from a shoebox and two bits of elastic, and is happy to give it away on the Internet. Except he only knows about matter transporters you can knock up from a shoebox, and nothing about SEO’s etc…etc…

Centuries later, this is discovered by the remains of the human race (which is a rock on Planet Grunt) the rest of it having been decimated by ravages of global warming that everybody could have avoided by knocking up their own shoe-box matter transporter. Instead they (we) all fried shouting…… “I AM GOOD SO PAY ME A LOT OF MONEY”. If you see what I mean.