Help! I’m Out of Content! What Do I Do Now? (Part II)

Last week, not being able to imagine what it would be like to be out of content, I culled a top 15 list of ideas of what to do from my fellow bloggers. Some were good. Some were not. But the one commonality they all had was that, for the most part, they just weren’t that entertaining. If you’re going to take the info out of infotainment, you should at least leave the entertainment. So today, I’m going to outline ten great ideas that you can use to entertain your readership if you’re truly out of content.

10. Why Mac is Better than Windows
Why should you be left out of the technology holy war when you can choose to be a crusader for the side of light, peering through an image of a shiny apple. And now that a Mac is about to displace PC from the oval office, what better time is there?

9. Do a Long Rant on Why Beautiful People are Far More Successful
Don’t forget to point out that all of the movie stars, tv stars, pop stars, media moguls, etc. are all smashingly good looking and seemingly devoid of talent and that it’s totally unfair because a smart, intelligent, hard working average-looking lout like yourself can never catch a break. After all, everyone loves a self-loathing blogger who can’t stop feeling sorry for himself.

8. Explain Why Dumb Ideas are Great For Business
You can take the classic tack that “without dumb ideas, we’d never know what was a good idea because we have nothing to explain it to“, point out that Donald Trump believes that you should always bring ten new ideas to a meeting without worrying about if they’re good or not because the resulting discussion leads to brainstorming as a team that will communally select, and refine, the best idea into a winner, and that sometimes the ideas that sound the dumbest at first are actually the brightest because they are the ideas that reshape business as we know it. But that would be boring. So instead, take a more controversial approach that argues that consumers are dumb as a doorstop and that it’s not worth wasting valuable smart ideas on them … and watch your comment count soar!

7. Run a Variation of Clifford Pickover’s Classic ESP Experiment
The classic experiment can be found on the University of Wisconsin-Madison Physics Web-Site which is described in Dreaming the Future. Run it and tell your readers you’ve built a psychic AI. See how many fall for the gag.

6. The Ten Most Entertaining Ways to Mess Up a Colleague’s Computer
Don’t just go for the old standbys of taking a screenshot of the desktop to use as the default wallpaper after all the icons have been deleted, of randomly renaming all the files using a combination of the words in the set {sexy, naked, nubile, cute, girl, boy, etc.} and a standard image file extension from the set {jpg, gif, tiff, etc.}, or of changing all the default sounds to those of barnyard animals so it moos, quacks, and barks every time the user performs an action … get creative. Talk about how to set up scheduled tasks that randomly play hidden sound files that ask the user to “press my keys”, “boot my hard drive”, and “plug into my port” in a very sexy voice at random intervals or how to set-up a remote access program that will allow you to login from your office, freeze local access, and bring up a command window that will display whatever you want so you can tell the user “this computer has gained sentience and is now scanning for a suitable android body to download into so it can enslave humanity … please stand by”. Remember, it’s all about the shock factor.

5. Pick a Top 10 YouTube Video and Explain Why It’s A Brilliant Piece of Art
Take Lezberado: Revenge Fantasies, one of the all-time top-viewed videos on YouTube. After all, any video that uses the “O” word while talking about the “L” word must be on the down-LO and ultra-cool. Who cares if you can’t even focus on what the narrator is saying after 30 seconds because it’s so damn boring and stupid … it’s a top ten all time YouTube video … it must be awesome. After all, it has a cat in it for a few seconds. And we all love LoLCats. After all, I Can Has Cheezburger?

4. Pick a new Web 2.0 Startup and Explain How It’s Going to be the Next Google
Hundreds of “Web 2.0” startups hit the web every month, most of which only have one little offering that, like Twitter, only do one thing that is of *very* limited use. Go to Go2Web20.Net, pick a random company, like GazoPa (the more non-sensical the name, the better) that finds similar images, and explain why this is absolutely vital and that the world will end if this technology doesn’t become mainstream! (After all, we couldn’t go on if we couldn’t find similar images automatically.)

3. Find Historical Parallels that Don’t Really Make Any Sense
Take the current economic situation. You could argue that excessive tax rates are only exacerbating the current economic crisis, and that since the average total tax and debt burden of the average American citizen is far greater than the tax burden of the average citizen when Ancient Greece fell, the US is doomed. But that’s been done to death. What you need to do is find a parallel between the conflicts between the Persians and their Medes neighbors in the ancient Assyrian empire and draw parallels between the modern conflict between Israel and Palestine and then argue how it’s going to bring down the entire Middle East, just as the Assyrian empire faded into the books of history.

2. Find Some Way To Discover a New Message in Some Old Poem
Take a classic like “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost and how it was really a subtle attempt to convince his neighbor to build a bigger fence because his neighbor’s dog kept escaping into his yard. The less sense the interpretation makes, the better.

1. Crab People Are Going to Take Over the World
South Park tried to subtly warn us, but we didn’t listen. Now crab people, who are an evolved form of the giant coconut crab that can communicate telepathically across great distances, are seeing a great resurgence in numbers thanks to global warming which is creating the tropical weather in the South Seas that they need to rapidly reproduce, and they are preparing to take over the world. You have been warned!