Fifteen
October 11th, 2008 | brainjuice, researchmaterial
Never having really followed the Gawker family of blogs, I’m pretty sure I didn’t know this, and was taken aback when I read it on Waking Vixen just now:
Gawker publishes posts every fifteen minutes during weekday work hours.
A rolling bullshit-ticker for people stuck at desks in America all day, I guess, drawing in from all of the Gawker blogs. Every fifteen minutes. Goddamn. I don’t know why, but that’s made me kind of sit down and think. Obviously, it’s not new, they’ve been doing it for years and I just never noticed because the most attention I pay is really no more than having the occasional callous snicker at Valleywag.
Can you imagine what this site would look like if it updated every fifteen minutes?
And I guess that that’s the genius of the Gawker system. Sit on the main Gawker site all day and you’ve got a rolling bullshit channel. Just leave it up there and hit refresh every now and then. As Waking Vixen points out, it may not particularly repay intensive and involved writing — but in a Burst Culture condition, anything longer than 500 words, an mp3 or a bit of YouTube on a blog is probably overdoing it anyway.
Every fifteen minutes. That site’s your friend for the working day, isn’t it? Always sitting there on a tab. If it could push, it’d be updating itself right in front of you.



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