Over at the Beat, Heidi wished us a happy anniversary…with some caveats.
Indeed, Hooded Utilitarian is one of the most exasperating comics sites in existence—a standard of smart commentary and insight often undone by an outrageous need to get links. As always, I’ll continue to praise the good and ignore the bad.
I responded in comments:
Hey Heidi. You’ve said this before, and I don’t really get it. As far as I can tell, the best way to get links is to cover news and write about popular things. I don’t make any concerted effort to do either of those; we hardly ever cover news, and people pretty much write about whatever they like, which is sometimes popular, but more often not.
I assume that the point is that I try to get links by being contrarian…but really, as far as I can tell, that’s not an especially good strategy. The things we’ve run that were most popular were Sean and Joy’s piece reimagining the Wire as a Victorian serial, Robert Stanley Martin’s best comics poll (which wasn’t contrarian at all, pretty much), Erica Friedman’s piece about why she loves Sailor Moon… The contrarian stuff sometimes sparks interesting discussion, and is worth doing for that reason, but if I was looking for hit counts qua hit counts, the site would be very different (probably more like the Beat…not that there’s anything wrong with that!)
Anyway; thanks for mentioning our anniversary!
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.
Bravo! I bet that “the good” is everything that’s popular.
In that site’s case, the “good” is uncritical postings covering the comics hype machine.
Yes, but Heidi MacDonald meant “the good” on [b]this[/b] site.
To be fair, I must add that I’m grateful to Heidi for mentioning my own blog The Crib Sheet when I started it.
I don’t really have an algorithm for what Heidi chooses to link to here, honestly. I don’t think it’s especially weighted towards the popular necessarily. It was nice of her to link to the anniversary, in any case.