Absent Eight
February 25, 2010 in Blogs
As I post Terminator part 6: John and Kate to the Examiner temporal anomalies series, I am very much aware that there is another “John and Kate” in the entertainment field, and that I might attract searches for that other couple and their collection of minors and tawdry gutter press adventures. I’m not worried about it. The Terminator series has not done so well as I anticipated, and an influx of traffic, even if it’s looking for something else, might help.
I am reminded of a discussion recently on the Christian Gamers Guild list. There is an online strategy game entirely about very nearly abstract kingdom building. Its Internet presence is defined by an ad series in which sexy female characters invite netizens to come “play”. It is apparently a rather effective ad campaign. Someone I know (outside the guild) who plays says there is a constant influx of new players who are around for about a week and then ask where all the sexy girls are, at which point the regulars tell them no, there are no sexy girls, it’s just a kingdom building strategy game, and about half of them leave–and about half of them stay. The three main positions in the argument are 1) because the ads are suggestive (some would say pornographic, but I think that’s a bit harsh) Christians should boycott the game; 2) Madison Avenue always uses sex to sell hamburgers, and everything else (seen any Quiznos ads lately?) and our participating in such a game should not be based on whether we approve the advertising techniques but whether we wish to be involved with people playing the game; 3) quite apart from the suggestive nature of the ads, they are misleading, a bait-and-switch technique, and we ought to boycott them on the principle that they are misrepresenting their product publicly. I was more inclined toward the second view (I am so moderate in everything), but I confess that there is something to the third.
I mention it because I think sometimes I get traffic to pages of people who were seeking something completely different, but liked what they found. Correct that. I know that that has happened sometimes frequently. My song lyrics I Use to Think, which contain the repeated refrain, “Is that all there is”, brings me occasional letters from people who were looking for the song of that title and finding mine instead wanted to thank me for them. So I know that a piece of a title or a repeated fragment of text on a page can bring traffic that wanted something else, and that this can be good traffic that comes back. So I’m not particularly unhappy about it–at least until I start to feel like I was intentionally misleading people.
I don’t feel that here. I thought of the title first, then spotted the connection. I’m sure that the fact that John and Kate without the eight have the same names as that other John and Kate influenced by decision to stay with this title, but I don’t think it was done deceptively, even if the deception is perceptibly to my advantage.
In other news, a couple months ago someone at Valdron Inc suggested that the company might like to produce and release a video lecture on time travel theory, by me. One of the directors there is in the field of video production, and considers it a plausible project. I’m not certain whether all the other hopes are realistic (it has been suggested that we could get it to air on PBS, and I will be very but not unpleasantly surprised if that happens), but the project has officially begun: I am writing the lecture. If nothing else, it will foster the illusion that I can teach in public. I haven’t done that for a few years now, and never from a script, but it’s something new, and hopefully I’m not too old for something new.
–M. J. Young
