Cyberbegging, Irritainment and the World's Most Hated Blogger

The folks over at CNET have an item on someone who they suggest might be "The World's Most Hated Blogger", a guy named Casey Serin.

Mr. Serin is/was a real estate speculator, and he got popped when the overheated real estate bubble... popped, leaving him a couple of hunnert thou in the hole, with 8 investment properties facing foreclosure.

So naturally, he started a blog about it (which is down right now, either hosed by traffic or maybe under attack).

According to the article, Serin has attracted a following of regular readers who hate him, and visit his site on a regular basis solely for the purpose of hating him (in the process, getting him some measure of advertising revenue.) 

Maybe he's just that hateable, or maybe some folks just like watching a trainwreck, but there's a community there, a phenomena possibly described by the term: "Irritainment"

It kind of reminds me of that exchange from the Howard Stern movie, Private Parts (strong language warning):

Researcher: The average radio listener listens for eighteen minutes a day. The average Howard Stern fan listens for - are you ready for this? - an hour and twenty minutes.
Pig Vomit: How could this be?
Researcher: Answer most commonly given: "I want to see what he'll say next."
Pig Vomit: All right, fine. But what about the people who hate Stern?
Researcher: Good point. The average Stern hater listens for two and a half hours a day.
Pig Vomit: But... if they hate him, why do they listen?
Researcher: Most common answer: "I want to see what he'll say next."

Anyway, Serin appears to be making something out of his personal drama.

Remember SaveKaryn?
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I'm reminded of another Internet trainwreck from a few years back, with Karyn Bosnak of SaveKaryn.com, one of the original cyberbegging Web sites.

Ifyou've forgotten, Bosnak had run up $20,000 in credit card debt, and put up a Web site asking for donations, the school of thought being, if 20,000 people each gave $1, she'd be home free.

(The flip side of this is an old joke, where a guy is selling apples for $50,000 each -- when asked why, he says it's because he "only has to sell one.")

Being one of the first people to do this, and since her story got picked up by the mainstream press, it actually worked for her; Bosnak's out of debt, and not soliciting for donations on her site any more.

Now, Bosnak had a first-mover advantage, since what she did pretty much hadn't been done before, and got noticed by lots of people. (Also see the 1987 story of the college kid who got a newspaper columnist to ask people for pennies to pay for his tuition. It worked.)

It's the kind of thing were it works (or doesn't) once, then the copycats swoop in, then it hits saturation point, and from that point on, no matter how deserving the person or how noble the cause, it becomes just another spam or chain mail solicitation.

Now, all is not lost -- last week, Wired had an article on a new microloan site, and there are all sorts of experiments going on with microcredit and the Third World, so there might still be ways to use technology and social media to hook up the people who need money, and the people who want to give money (though generally speaking, if there's anything more vulnerable to gaming and manipulation, I can't think of any off the top of my head).

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: casey serin, karyn bosnak, microloans, microcredit, cyberbegging, social media