Sensationalism and Link-Baiting

Two complementary articles came up in my feed reader today. Russell Beattie criticizes a trend he’s seeing in the blog posts he reads:

I know how once in a while throwing a juicy post up on your server with some name calling, extreme opinions and a swear word or two can drive serious linkage and hits. You write stuff online every day for a few years, and its bound to get boring just following the same old routine, right? Might as well take a stick and poke at the bee-hive once in a while and see what happens. … Now it’s at the point where people have to write almost nothing but sensationalistic posts on their blog to get any attention. The more extreme, the more likely you’ll be to get links.

Meanwhile, Performancing writes their own tips on “link baiting,” the practice of writing posts so they’ll get attention from other bloggers. The “attack hook” that so annoys Beattie is there, but they also recommend the “news hook,” the “contrary hook,” the “resource hook,” and the “humor hook.”

Me, I prefer the “cute hook.” I mean, seriously. No one can resist linking to the pandog.