Blog P.I.

The latest edition of The Onion contains a brief item poking fun at the blogosphere:

Entire Blogosphere Stunned By Blogger’s Special Weekend Post
November 28, 2007 | Issue 43•48

NEW YORK—In what is being called a seminal moment in Internet history, a rare weekend post by 25-year-old blogger Ben Tiedemann on his website bentiedemanntellsall.blogspot.com rocked the 50 million-member blogosphere this Saturday.

The landmark post, which updated nearly every member of the global online community on the shelf Tiedemann was building, was linked to by several thousand sites, including Daily Kos, Digg, and The New York Times.

Wow, what a special treat this was for all of us,” said Talking Points Memo head blogger Joshua Micah Marshal, who, along with all other bloggers, checks Tiedemann’s site every day just in case something monumental occurs. “I thought I was going to have to wait until Monday to find out if Ben decided to put [the shelf] in his bedroom or the living room. The pictures were great, too.”

Within two hours of going live, Tiedemann’s 15-word post received 34,634,897 comments.

But who is Ben Tiedemann? It turns out, he’s one of their one-shot op-ed “contributors.” In fact, “Ben Tiedemann” boasted about his blog in The Onion in May of this year:

Follow the given URL, and it turns out Ben Tiedemann Tells All is a real blog, although it’s not much of one. Between May 14 and 16 of this year, someone — one assumes the true author of the initial article (and very likely the latest one) — grabbed the Blogspot account named above and created an account to post… garbled poetry? Here’s the initial post, in its entirety:

here are the launch codes you asked for

one day I’ll say give me back
the charts and graphs of my youth
that once defended the world stage
the apocalyptic drift takes it all in
totalling all the extra doors with ways

they’ll say strange things exist in what he is
no one will ever see the last of it for sure
one must learn not to learn the language
thank the easiness of cutting up the effects
build in an ornamental discussion of meaning
and three things have elements of or on blank

there are reasons to see the sunrise
that would prove extremely disturbing
if revealed to the general public then
this time of global wealth creation lifestyle
for the reign of absolute ecstasy can’t end
the next in the order of which came first
there it is sound and sense together in love
you can hear it in the constant little facts

There is a Gmail address associated with the Blogger profile, so I sent “Ben Tiedemann” a message earlier this week, but haven’t heard back. I am quite certain the account has long since been abandoned. But if I hear anything, I’ll let you know.