2011-01-17

A Brief Side-Note

Hilariously, this blog has seen an uptick in search engine hits, thanks to the fact that Halle Berry was mentioned in  my previous post. I'm not above cheap tricks to increase my readership, but I cannot claim credit for having premeditated this. It was purely an accident of rhetoric.

It does pose a question, though. Can I be a more persuasive blogger if I tailor my language to suit a search-engine-driven internet? I could casually mention a sexy celebrity in each of my posts. I could use bikinis and exotic locations as analogies to proclaim the virtues of the free market. I could even take a page from other pop culture icons and change the name of my blog from Stationary Waves to The Nude Economist. This blog is monetized; think of the AdSense revenue potential.

A laundry-list of interesting words from the above paragraph: pose, sexy, celebrity, bikinis, exotic, free, pop culture, and nude.

So what do you think? Would such an approach be unethical, or brilliant marketing? How much sex need an honest man sell in order to get his ideas out to a critical mass of readers? Is simply asking the question going too far already? Should the business of ideas mingle with the business of baser interests?

Sometimes it's not clear on this blog when I'm being deliberately wry. In case you've been missing the joke here, let me assure you that I am being extremely wry. But if Ayn Rand can sell philosophy by writing novels and Jon Stewart can sell politics using comedy, what's to stop anyone from selling economics using sex?

Like so many other things, these questions are easily resolved by an individual's creed. Perhaps I will blog about creeds next; I'd like to bring them back into favor.

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