Humor works. Humor + Neg­a­tiv­ity works even bet­ter. Here’s how I found out.

While this post will cer­tainly not become viral, I have been study­ing viral mar­ket­ing and wanted to share about a small exper­i­ment I did. I read a book called World Wide Rave: Cre­at­ing Trig­gers that Get Mil­lions of Peo­ple to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Sto­ries (Kin­dle Edi­tion) in which the author states

It turns out peo­ple react to neg­a­tives. Sev­eral years ago, I worked on a site where we included a link “For Exec­u­tives Only,” which gen­er­ated more traf­fic than other links. Words like worst, don’t, and only are inter­est­ing, and peo­ple want to know what’s there.

This got my cre­ative juices flow­ing and I decided to exper­i­ment. Con­tin­u­ing to read in the World Wide Rave we see an exam­ple of a blog­ger, Mark Hin­kle, who did a satir­i­cal arti­cle on Ubuntu. Just so hap­pens I have a blog on Ubuntu. I copied the idea by mak­ing a neg­a­tive arti­cle of “Top 10 Rea­sons I’ll Never Use Ubuntu.” This list was not seri­ous at all, actu­ally it was a list of 10 things I love about Ubuntu. And it was hastily writ­ten, jot­ted down in about 10 minutes.

It worked! The blog nor­mally receives 200 vis­i­tors per day. After 20 hours of my post being live it had 2764 vis­i­tors. It had been picked up by a cou­ple of Linux blogs, it got dugg, it was Stum­bled, it was twit­tered, it made it into Ubuntu forums, and it sparked some rather inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions in comments.

Only one other time have I had that kind of suc­cess on my Ubuntu blog, and it was an arti­cle that I spent hours on.

1. It’s too inex­pen­sive. In fact, pay­ing is only an option & I don’t feel com­pelled to pay for it. It’s just not as fun own­ing an oper­at­ing sys­tem I don’t have to pay for.
2. It’s too pretty. The abil­ity to apply any theme, or build my own, ruins my sense of cama­raderie with my fel­low OS users. Where’s the sense in com­plete personalization?
3. It’s too fun. Com­put­ers were never meant to be fun. When they become fun they become dangerous.
4. It’s updated too fre­quently. All those updates are just pesky. Do we really need the bleed­ing edge all the time?
5. The com­mu­nity is too active. They’re just too help­ful. I miss that sweet, sub­tle music while I’m on hold with tech sup­port in India.
6. There’s too much soft­ware to choose from. Who needs choices when I can just by the stuff rec­om­mended and pre-installed by the OEM?
7. The hard­ware it sup­ports is too mod­ern. It cre­ates that uncon­trol­lable urge to upgrade my hardware!
8. It does too much. If only my oper­at­ing sys­tem allowed me to do less, I’d feel less inclined to be pro­duc­tive with it.
9. It’s too friendly with other oper­at­ing sys­tems. I want my oper­at­ing sys­tem to play in its own sand­box with like minded kids. None of this shar­ing and mingling.
10. It’s too pro­duc­tive. Can’t I just have an excuse to play games?

A friend of mine wrote this awe­some post ask­ing the ques­tion “Why focus on space travel when we have so many con­cerns to address within our Earth Com­mu­nity?” Check out her post to see why :)

Hehe…almost as good as the but­tered toast cat array, here is the fly-powered model airplane.

You’d bet­ter hurry—I’m not sure how long this offer will last!

I found an awe­some deal this week­end. The book enti­tled “Ubuntu Unleashed, 2008 Edi­tion” from Sams comes with a free upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10! I found this at the local Barnes & Noble.

But don’t fret if there’s no Barnes & Noble in your area. The list­ing at Ama­zon states that it “Includes a DVD with a full Ubuntu Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion, plus a free upgrade to Ubuntu Linux 8.10 once it is released.”

Sim­ply amazing…can you believe there just givin’ this stuff away?

Really…is this nec­es­sary? A “Free Upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10″ sticker on the book “Ubuntu Unleashed, 2008 Edi­tion” from Sams.

The “Free Upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10″ sticker

Hehehe. This is soooo true.

View orig­i­nal comic at xkcd.