So begins each post: “My friend so-and-so surprised me with a You Make My Day Award. Thank you! (You should really check out their wonderful blog!) I’m to post this with the following proviso,” etc, etc.
Nothing wrong with a little guerrilla marketing, in this case lighting a back fire up the social network where blogroll links and reciprocal courtesy comments were just not keeping everyone’s interest. Internet blogging has set into motion a real-time one hundred monkeys experiment, but of course someone has to address the task of monitoring the output. We won’t know if even a blogosphere of monkeys typing away can produce Shakespeare unless somebody is diligently evaluating the gibberish.
It didn’t take long tracing the roots of the You-Make-My-Day-Award givers to find someone who explained the rules as: “You have to pass this on to ten people” etc. And there it is. The YMMDA is a chain letter. And like so many viral emails, its driving force is a smile over coffee, pass it on.
Chain emails, whether they promise warm and fuzzies or anticipation that Bill Gates will personally pay you a quarter of a million dollars, are disseminated to chart social networks, yours. They plot connections between people, particularly the veracity of those connections measured by the speed and frequency with which you give your friends priority. Such information is valuable to anyone wanting a bead on you. Use your imagination.
So the You-Make-My-Day-Award is netting bloggers, internet users who may have moved on from circulating those clever email chain letters. I’m perhaps most disappointed that people using their blogs as creative outlets, can’t be creative enough to praise each other on their own initiative. They have to borrow a concept, a graphic and a blurb, and admonish each other to keep it up. These monkeys are getting tired.
You can’t praise something if you don’t know it exists. I like receiving links to interesting blogs, especially if they belong to readers who appreciate mine. I guess the You Make My Day Awards are the small-time blogger awards–a pat on the back for those of us who toil alone, benefiting lord knows who, if anyone.
I have found some of my favorite sites by following blogroll links which are just another form of networking, really. And one that you apparently embrace with great relish.
I think your Lord Knows malaise illustrates my point.
Yes, the award is sweet, At 16,900 and counting, hopefully everyone will get one. Maybe I’m crabby because we haven’t made anybody’s day yet.
According to Technorati there are about 100 million blogs out there. I’m sure we’ll make someone’s day before it’s all said and done!
interesting! this post came up when I googled the award, looking for the origin (as I was nominated for one by a fellow blogger). i’m wondering, do you know the origin of it? who was the first blogger to start it? is there someone behind it specifically trying to chart social networks, or is it just a meme that someone started to make other people feel good? I have to admit it didn’t seem the least bit sinister to me, I thought it was nice. But I did want to know where it came from originally and I can’t seem to, which is enough to make a person wonder…
I certainly can’t say that the originators of YMMD were any other than warm hearted pepsters. But the web they originated became a drift net for anyone’s dredging operation.