Postal Experiments and massaging the blogosphere
I don’t know why, but I love reading about folks who mess with the postal service. A site called Direct Creative has a fun article on the things they were able to get the Post Office to deliver in spite of postal regulations. Apparantly, the “agents” involved were beset at every turn by courteous professionalism, even though not everything they tried to mail was delivered.
The thing about the article that floored me, however, is that Direct Creative is a site for educating direct marketers, a class of people I normally consider to be enemies of all that is good in the world. Yet the author muses about how
… delivery involved the collusion of sequences of postal workers, not simply lone operatives. The USPS appears to have some collective sense of humor, and might in fact here be displaying the rudiments of organic bureaucratic intelligence.
I’m fairly impressed that a marketer is capable of displaying a sense of humor and “organic intelligence” too. I’m suffering from major cognitive dissonance here. You mean they’re people?
But wait! Down there in wee text at the bottom of the article:
Copyright © 2000 Annals of Improbable Research. All Rights Reserved.
Oh. It’s a reprint. With permission or without, I dare to wonder? This text file on the Improbable Research site attributes the article to Jeff Van Bueren, just like the Direct Creative version. The main difference is that the text file is from 2001 and lists Van Bueren specifically as the “‘Postal Experiments’ author” as if “Postal Experiments” was a particularly popular and well-known Improbable Research article. A Google search for “postal experiments” (in quotes) turns up many hits about the article, mostly bloggers (like me) linking to the same article at Direct Creative. But the Direct Creative article is dated April 11 2006!
Now I’ve read on some “how to make money with your blog”-type sites about how one needs some keystone articles to send traffic to your blog, and about how those articles can be made “sticky” (like a PHPBB post) so that they always seem to have been posted the day you are reading them so that they have that air of fresh baked content. This particular content was heated out of a can though. And had its expiration date pasted over a few times. It’s as old and spoiled as this metaphor I keep flogging.
At least I don’t have to keep wondering if I’m wrong about marketers. The sole purpose of the article is to be particularly funny and send traffic to the site, all while seeming as if it were the latest funny thing to travel down the wires. I guess I’m helping, too, by linking there–but at least here your old, rehashed content comes with a side of cynicism and a little information for spice.