As I checked this recently-started blog today I was wondering at the continued lack of visitors and subscribers. OK so I’ve rushed out a number of articles up until now simply to give my blog some content as a base or foundation on which to build. Some of the articles may lack content in themselves or be short on page-formatting admittedly: OK I call that my green blogging credentials; hell I’ve only been at this game a few weeks and I’m trying to establish a reputation and an online presence.

Links links links: Nobody links to me – OK very few people know me as such online as yet; but I’m there in Google somewhere at the back-end of the results. Of course if more people linked to me I’d rise up the table somewhat. I’ve already started to feel like a social pariah in a way: There are very few bloggers in the UK; and those that there are are invariably male – Which surprised me to some extent; as women are generally much more communicative than men – But as I was soon to learn it’s not so much a case of a desire to communicate amongst men but more of a testosterone-driven ego-thing:

I looked at my email. Something had arrived from the desk of Tara Hunt who runs ::HorsePigCow:: marketing uncommon (http://www.horsepigcow.com/), and who I subscribe to. I read down and clicked a few links: and somehow found my way to a blog by Shelley Powers and a very fitting article http://burningbird.net/connecting/guys-dont-link/ called “Guy’s Don’t Link”.

Now please do read that; (If you don’t you won’t know what I’m on about from hereonin.) it says one hell of a lot; and quite frankly I believe, no matter how tongue-in-cheek the article was intended to be, that she has hit the nail squarely on the head. Freudian in nature it may well be; but a link as a guy’s penis extension makes sense to me. The internet is becoming a great big men’s room, with male tech-nerds turning to cyberspace to show off their prowess and compete in a virtual-male-bonding- exercise.

It therefore follows that the more their links are used the more their virtual organ perpetrates its flow of seed onto the net, and when bonded males link to each other’s sites…hmm I don’t want to get into the subject of virtual male-link-homosexuality in this article – The scenario is becoming far too complicated and heavy for my liking. But following that line – It makes sense for guys to link to women’s blogs as we girls are quite fertile in imagination and in verbal dexterity: With a little encouragement we could make product together: Fertilise ideas and spawn baby-blogs that grow into adult proportions and become objects of adoration for us and status symbols for the men: Oh yes they have no idea of the huge chances they are missing out on due to their chauvinism! – Online dating will never be the same. Cybersex will take on a whole new meaning; with a growing collective of blogfathers perpetrating the blogosphere by means of putting their links around and increasing the seed of the internet, traffic, to flow through their link-tools.

The Alpha-blogger and ruler of all blogging tribes will one day stand on high at the top of his mighty domain; draw his autolinker from its embedded cyber-sheath, hold it aloft above his head and declare in a loud voice to all the online community

“By the power of html – I have the power!”

And what of those males with linkage dysfunction? What of the cyber-dykes who accept no links from men and block all such attempts?  What of the male bloggers who prefer to stay in the men’s rooms and link to one another in a cybergay clique? Who amongst the girls will end up with virtual cystic fibrosis? What if there were an online AIDS epidemic? Would male bloggers indulge in the act of bloggery? Would there be a population explosion? Is the planet destined to be a world  only of servers after significant advances in artificial intelligence; hardly able to sustain the blog population? What of the real human race: Will it be replaced by IT?! :-

The skeleton of the last Alpha-Blogger lies in an open sarcophagus next to his statue outside his crumbling abode, ravaged by the passage of time -The only piece of available land no longer occupied by a building containing millions of servers, each hosting hundreds of blogs. Planet earth is almost barren apart from the server complexes stretching out into infinity and seeming to vanish on the horizon. The maintenance-droids occasionally wander through the corridors between buildings in the cool of the evening; each assigned a new task to maintain another server unit. Here and there uncleared vegetation takes a hold on a patch of ground between the vast walls of the giant complexes, as termites; one of the few surviving lifeforms, aerate the soil and attempt to construct their partially above-ground accommodation.

Inside a beautifully-furnished house in the Northern hemisphere of the newly-terraformed Mars there’s an all-girl party going on. Men had all but died out save for the few that travelled to Mars before the accomplishments of masculinity finally ruined the planet which they had once taken charge of. The situation is now reversed as it should be, with women – The most prolific and intelligent gender of the human species in charge of the new planetary home. Any men that are on Mars are selected by the leaders for breeding duties to perpetuate the human race. The tables have turned, and at last by bitter experience the men have discovered that the macho ways are counterproductive.

Deceptive as always, however, in an underground cellar hidden from view of the new civilisation, a group of men meet under the name “The Cult of Open Source”. The speaker, known only as Linux User 1, engages a switch and the monitor traces expand out from the point of origin as the seeds of revolution are sown. A voice crackles into existence on the audio:

“This is Linux User 256 : Remote – Linking to your blog…”

Perhaps to be continued…

Picture: I think the Linux Users have just found some real technology.