Saturday, April 11, 2009

Edgelings - A Commenter Bestiary

By Michael Malone. Pretty Funny. He has about 20 examples of blog commenters , here are some:

The Droll - The mainstay of all fun sites, this poster regularly tosses out clever comments, plays of words, one-liners, amusing pictures. There’s a lot of these characters on places like Fark.com

The Relentless Pol - Posters who can’t join any discussion without immediately using it to make a political point, i.e., “The current lack of sunspots is the direct result of the Bush Administration’s failed policies.”

The Butt-Kisser - Famous writers and bloggers get this one. It’s the poster who just can’t say enough about how brilliant was that last entry, how they wish they could say it half as good, etc. My assumption is that these folks are angling for some kind of personal relationship with the writer.

The Kumbaya - These folks always show up two-thirds the way through any heated on-line debate and asks “Why can’t we all just get along?” They are inevitably ignored or trashed.

The Parser - What would we do without the Internet Grammar Police? These folks assiduously correct the online writings of others - never quite catching on that the Web is designed to be fast, fresh and sloppy.

The Alien - This is a poster from another country who has no context for what every commenter is talking about, and so asserts his or her own cultural solution: “Why this complain about wife? Sell gotes and buy more wifes!”

The Martian - Finally, these are the commentators whose combination of pretzel logic, conspiratorial tone, and downright weirdness - “Well, we all know the Pope is behind that big lake of fire at the South Pole, don’t we?” - reminds you that the world is an even scarier place than we imagine, and makes you wonder if this writing for the Internet gig is such a good idea after all.

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