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By Root 806 0

the right implied in the parody spoke for itself. In the second, breakout group—the ironists—fans tended to cite specific, anarchic B jokes. Gawker reproduced two of the parody Times’s image boxes (depicting the pornographic art show called “Two Dudes Strokin’ It” and the dining piece called “Cooking with Placentas and Cocaine”). On the blog of Seattle’s alternative weekly The Stranger, editor Dan Savage made “Two Dudes Strokin’ It” the title of his post. The MetaFilter poster, who calls himself “brain_ drain” (in fact “a litigation attorney at a large law firm in New York City,” he told me in an e-mail, though beyond that he asked to remain anonymous), took as the name of his post the title of one of the op-ed articles supposedly written by Michael Moore: “I Hate America Even More This Week.” Among the third, more speculative audience—conservatives—the site’s reception was not entirely warm, but nevertheless seemed as good as could be expected. David Frum, the man who as speechwriter for George W. Bush invented the phrase “axis of evil,” linked to it in his blog on the National Review website, driving a considerable amount of traffic. At the site Hot Air, a poster named AllahPundit gave it a glowing review, and cited one of the parody’s specifically conservative jokes—“Vows: Jane Fonda, 69, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, 55”—adding, “It’s that good.”

POSTGAME

After that weekend, the contest was essentially over, even though two entire weeks of it remained. The Right-Wing New York Times would finish with roughly 155,000 visitors, while no other entry made a serious move to challenge: Gary Lee Stewart and Jeff Meyers stayed in second and third place, respectively, with less than 20,000 visitors apiece:

FIG. 3-7—THE FINAL SCORE

These were cumulative numbers, of course; a graph of the actual new visitors per day during the blowup looked like this:

FIG. 3-8—THE SPIKE (AGAIN)

A week or so into September, I met up with Jonah for a postgame chat. I told him that Will Murphy and I would be getting a drink together near the Bowery, and he should come along. When he arrived, I said that Will was going to be late, but I bought us beers and we began to talk shop. Jonah was starting a new company of his own, called BuzzFeed, a website that would identify new trends in online conversation by crawling blogs and analyzing the links. His idea was that if the various blog posts were properly aggregated, not only would intriguing trends emerge but BuzzFeed users could read them directly in the bloggers’ own words.

What was revolutionary about blogging, he pointed out, was the way that the audience could become, in effect, the actors, watching their influence on culture even as they described it. “Even just linking to something,” he observed, could be an act of self-conscious trend-setting. “Marketers are telling me that this should be popular,” as he described the blogger mentality, “but I want this thing to be popular, so I’m going to trumpet it myself.”

I agreed. “That’s one of the things that makes blogging so exciting,” I said. “You think you’re going to comment on culture, report on it by being a blogger. But in the end, you get drawn into the idea that you can start trends. People come in thinking they’re meme-watchers, but they become meme-makers.”

“Right, right,” Jonah said.

“It’s funny,” I went on, “because as I was reporting on the Contagious Festival, there was some of that same excitement. You want to be an observer, but you get drawn into it, and you wind up wanting to be a participant.”

“You mean you personally?” he asked.

“Yeah!”

“You thought to yourself, ‘I can win this thing.’ ”

“Right. In fact”—I paused for as much drama as I could muster—“I am Will Murphy.”

“What?”

“I am Will Murphy.”

“That’s why he’s not here yet?”

“Right.”

He thought for a moment. “Now I don’t feel bad that you paid for the drinks,” he said. It was true: I had won $2,500, though after the two beers plus tip, it was down to $2,488.

Sitting there, it occurred to me that the two of us, Jonah and I, were part of another nascent subculture,