In my brief time in the blog-o-truncated-icosahedron (I’m not convinced it’s a sphere), I’ve gotten to know and be indifferent to the automatic pingback. The strange and wonderful spiders/bots that crawl the web and look for keywords, and link to your blog post. Much of the time, it happens because of some innocuous term you’ve included — just yesterday, I wrote about some non-hoops player being officially included in the NBA draft, and made mention of the NFL, and got a pingback from somebody’s NFL-themed blog. I mentioned taxes the weekend before April 15th, and got three tax-related pingbacks. They obviously were not from people who had read the post.

So I got to thinking, (always a dangerous thing)

What word could one use to maximize the pingbacks? Not that this is a noble or desirable goal or anything. I imagine many blogs just turn off the feature of allowing pingbacks in the comments if and when it becomes plague-level

Could this play on any competitive nature bloggers might have?

And would they be willing to “waste” a post doing something so stupid? The answer that is almost certainly, “yes” from the “many-blogs” interpretation of the universe that I just made up: there isn’t a topic so stupid that you can’t find somebody to blog about it. Case in point.

But we need rules. This should be a one-shot experiment based on your own experiences and ingenuity, rather than using multiple iterations.

— The post shall be eight words in length, and the length of the post shall be eight (five is right out!). Just written out as a (probably) nonsensical sentence
— No links in the post, or anything embedded or invisible
— Title should be the same for everyone: “Robo-tag blog game” No fair sneaking in extra words here!
— Sites that already pingback to everything you post don’t count
— Multiple attempts (if you really want to go there) can’t duplicate words from a previous post

And, of course, anything else I can think of that will maximize my chances of winning. (Having a small number of regular readers, not all of whom blog, certainly helps with that)

“Seriously” though, any other rules anyone can think of?