Death By Blogging, NYT Style

I'm not sure the last time I saw a New York Times piece that failed to convince, well, anybody. It may be because Matt Richtel made the classic mistake of developing a thesis and sticking to it until he found some evidence. (Academic tip: A good thesis comes after research.)

Richtel's thesis that the blogosphere (or the home office) constitutes "the digital-era sweatshop," wherein cardiac arrest seems as eventual as black lung, proved an attention-getting one. The post, entitled In most blogged NYT story over the weekend.

It trumped—by six places—Thom Shanker's piece about how the US Army is concerned about the a change in latitude. Others (the survivors) complain of weight gain and not sleeping well.

Gawker's pay-per-page-view model has conscripted bloggers into an army of insomniacs, often posting until the great by-and-by of sleep imposes itself upon them and they lurch forward at their desks. Think of the poor souls at Valleywag, forced into the digital sex trade because nobody reads their posts without a little nookie mentioned; How can one possibly subsist in the Valley on a diet of unfounded rumors and no va-va-voom?

Some bloggers are paid as little as $10 per post. (I can do you one better. I've seen offers as little as $3 per post, as little as "for the fun of it." Ooh, where do I sign up?) Is that even enough to supply your protein supplement and coffee regimen?

Or not. The blogosphere can be swifter in these matters. The lines are long at the blog search engines, where bloggers have weighed in with what should have been the obvious. Mainly, to sum up many, they had these objections:

1. Those Indian kids you see on TV cooking silk worms (See: sweatshops).
2. Every man or woman who has ever put on a fireman's, police, doctor's, military, coal miner's, or steel worker's uniform are real medical research.
6. Three events don't make a trend. Six events don't either. You'll need not include a guy in your article because he doesn't fit your sexy thesis/headline.
8. Some people are just obsessive, competitive freaks.
9. Some people are just narcissistic, obsessive, competitive freaks.
10. Some people are just

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