The NYT photo today showing Anil Dash wearing a Goatse t-shirt was the talk of the blogosphere. (Feedster shows 414 links already.) I heard about it from Chris Anderson over dinner. He made an insightful observation: Anil “hacked” the NYT, figuring that no one there would recognize the cult reference, but that it would be a media event to those in certain net subcultures. Anil placed an “easter egg” squarely in the middle of a news story. It struck me that Anil was onto something: the power of a shared secret to make news in the blogosphere. The hack is particularly clever, since the NYT story was about the persistence of old images in google searches. That makes Anil’s easter egg a subtle one indeed.
Anil said: “Of course, the hook for the story is that the writer didn’t like the picture of herself that came up if you searched for her name. Fortunately for me, the picture of me that accompanies the story will offer plenty of amusement for anybody who’s familiar with Internet culture. (All those links are work-safe, but the things linked on those pages most definitely are not.)”
Correction: While Feedster now shows 800+ links on the front page, clicking through to the second shows only fifteen. While my point about this being a clever social hack stands, it appears to have had less of a blog buzz than I thought. Not sure I understand the Feedster bug.