metafilter in books

September 14, 2004 4:48 PM

Whoa! I dropped "metafilter.com" into amazon to try and find that alexa site ranking thing, and found out the site appears in 14 books.
posted by mathowie (staff) to MetaFilter-Related at 4:48 PM (27 comments total)

there are a couple crappy sounding marketing books listed (I guess to try and drive traffic to your v1agra site through MeFi), there's even a copy/paste job of y6y6y6's comments, but the granddaddy of them all is Save Karyn, which starts on the first few pages.

She quotes extensively from the first thread, where people kind of tore her story to shreds. Go through the search result, then click to "page 1" which puts me on page 339, but then hit the "next page" a couple times to see all the metafilter comments. Hilarious stuff.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 4:51 PM on September 14, 2004

i'm getting an amazon error message.
posted by Stynxno at 4:52 PM on September 14, 2004

"Browser Bug? Attention: There appears to be a bug in the web browser you are currently using."

i get that in IE6 and FF .08 on win2k. strange.
posted by quonsar at 4:52 PM on September 14, 2004

here's where the save karyn stuff starts.

Oh, and just plop "metafilter.com" into amazon's search to see the results.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 4:53 PM on September 14, 2004

#2 result: "Full Frontal PR: Getting People Talking about You, Your Business, or Your Product "

They're onto us.
posted by Salmonberry at 4:57 PM on September 14, 2004

From The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram, by Thomas Blass:

1. on Page 276:
"... A posting to the community Web site Metafilter put it this way: "Got my copy of Obedience to Authority right here. The little fire of hatred for humanity it inspires keeps me warm at night. Exaggeration aside, I honestly believe that Milgram's Obedience Experiments ... were not only the most important thing I learned in college, but the most important thing I possibly could have learned. ..." [Note that the ellipses in the middle of NortonDC's quote replace the parenthetical "(capitalization Well Fucking Earned)."]
2. from Back Matter:
"... 268 A posting to ... Metafilter: Dated January 14, 2003, by "NortonDC." ..."

We have citations!
posted by languagehat at 5:21 PM on September 14, 2004

it's all good, but as Mister Wolf warned:
Well, let's not start suckin' each other's dicks quite yet.
posted by matteo at 5:48 PM on September 14, 2004

!
posted by NortonDC at 8:47 PM on September 14, 2004

Is this the thread where we stumble onto the secret to bilking Amazon out of free MetaFilter books?
posted by soyjoy at 9:35 PM on September 14, 2004

Just wait for when I release "Metafilter: Behind the laughter" in the second quarter of next year.
posted by seanyboy at 11:32 PM on September 14, 2004

Blue.
Newsfilter.
MetaTalk.
Quonsar.

Metafilter: Behind the Laughter.
posted by Krrrlson at 12:08 AM on September 15, 2004

I put in a pretty small mention in a chapter I wrote in a textbook on corporate communication (context setting rather than anything else). Not sure if it showed up in your text search, but they do sell it at Amazon.
posted by bifter at 2:15 AM on September 15, 2004

Just checked, yeah it does! Crikey. Unfortunately I only got one copy of the book, so can't really send a freebie, but I can send you the text if you want it let. Let me know if so. It really isn't a massive mention though.
posted by bifter at 2:38 AM on September 15, 2004

Oh yeah, I guess mine was in one of the "crappy sounding marketing books" :-p.

The chapter was on electronic activism, and the metafilter mention was just an example when making the case for treating teh intarweb as a key influencer in reputational issues. It was more about avoiding inappropriate online marcomms, than spamming message boards, of course....

George Monbiot and Nick Nicholls (can't say I agreed with his piece, but loved the phrase: "corporations need to wake up and smell the menacing dogs") also wrote chapters in the same book, so it was a cut above your usual marketing junk I think, even if they did ask me to contribute... ;-)
posted by bifter at 3:35 AM on September 15, 2004

Ah well, I'll take the credit for letting Karyn know she was being shredded to teensy little pieces on the blue. And for being one of the few who defended her ;-)
posted by i_cola at 5:17 AM on September 15, 2004

Darn. Where Save Karyn quotes my line "She needs to go to church," she fails to note that the word church was linked to an old MSNBC story about a church which paid off all of the congregation's credit card debts.
posted by brownpau at 7:31 AM on September 15, 2004

Obviously snark subtlety is not one of her strong points.
posted by neckro23 at 8:30 AM on September 15, 2004

from save karyn: "my site was also being discussed on another blog called paintballresource.org"

Yup, we in the big leagues now.
posted by milovoo at 8:43 AM on September 15, 2004

Sounds like Karyn was trying to pad out the word count.
posted by drezdn at 9:40 AM on September 15, 2004

wow. I feel so close to fame and yet so very, very far. Being a member of metafilter is sort of like having that 1 roommate in college who's sister dated that guy who knew Ringo. So close to something so well known and yet still so very insignificant. I take a perverse comfort in that.
posted by Grod at 11:16 AM on September 15, 2004

Metafilter: I take perverse comfort in that.
posted by SpecialK at 1:28 PM on September 15, 2004

Grod: Hey! My college roommate's mother went out with Pete Best. Or maybe lived 'round the corner from him. Or something.
posted by i_cola at 2:11 PM on September 15, 2004

Pete Best and metafilter, sitting in a tree
posted by ZippityBuddha at 4:04 PM on September 15, 2004

I didn't know how the Internet worked much.

Nor copyright laws, evidently.

I think the best line I ever read on Karyn was in a letter she got and posted on her Web site - "... you seem to go out of your way to be even more annoying than you actually are."
posted by orange swan at 6:01 AM on September 16, 2004

MetaFilter: More annoying than it actually is.
posted by Songdog at 1:20 PM on September 16, 2004

But still less annoying than this from Karyn's "random thought" page of her web site:

Today I cracked open an egg and two whole yolks came out. That's kind of sad, right? It was twins. Chicky twins. I didn't eat it. I felt too bad. Especially because it's April and Easter's right around the corner. I wonder what it would have looked like if I boiled it. If anyone else out there has ever cracked open a two-yolk egg, let me know.

See what I mean?
posted by orange swan at 7:24 PM on September 16, 2004

MetaFilter: The Pete Best of the internet.
posted by milovoo at 4:57 PM on September 19, 2004