Ok, to me Fark is just one more social network, albeit a big one that I get a bit of traffic from. I found Fark because it is one of those little buttons at the bottom of so many posts. Digg was featured in USA Today and several social networks were mentioned. I’ll have to check and see if Fark was one of them. Anyway, Fark is fun in that it has all these little headings you can put on a story. Silly, Asinine, Interesting, Amusing, and so on and so forth. Fark is the place to look for the latest winner of The Darwin Award and the latest rumors about death by PopRocks and Coke. But I didn’t really know that.
Until I found a book on Fark at the Library. It’s not News, it’s Fark. Well, that does suck as a tagline, doesn’t it? It’s a good name for a website, as good as Google, eBay, or Amazon, well, better, Fark is it’s own word and there is no getting it confused with a really big number, a virtual loading dock, or a river in South America. Ok, I confess, I am totally intimidated by Fark and most of the other networks that I submit my blog posts to. There is sooo much out there. Goofy news and odd events and people begging us to Leave Britney Alone.
How do you sort through it all?
Well, you let Fark do it for you. That’s what a lot of the ‘funny’ DJs of the world do. I wonder if Jay Leno finds the occasional headline here.
So, I think we need to come up with a better tag line for Fark. All the Fark that fits to Fark? Ah, too silly that. Stories to Fark by? A Fark in the wind? Fark me, Fark me now. Well, maybe it’s not news, it’s Fark isn’t so bad.
Fark the Book is not nearly as fun as might be, but it is kind of interesting. If you’ve ever seen The Darwin Awards book or one of the Click and Clack books and thought, hey, that sounds like fun, you’ll understand the experience of reading this book. It sounds like fun. This is not the story of Fark, as I was half expecting, as everyone seems all too eager to blow their own horns, but it is a collection of Fark articles. Sorry Drew, but I never heard of you, even though your name appears in front of Fark in the Google search results. Drew Curtis does a good deal of name dropping and talking about how popular he is with CNN and morning DJs around the country-again, sorry, never heard of you. I mean, it’s not like he’s Perez Hilton or something.
It is surprising how many of these stories that the author claims as Not News I have seen and remember watching and/or reading. This is almost like a book of urban legends as seen through the eyes of the ten o’clock news. But Drew never gives any actual stories, he just tells them like he’s at a bar and your sitting across from him looking for the nearest exit.
A typical story is about The New Madrid Fault Line, which is the biggest fault line in America and runs along the course of the Mississippi River. This fault line story, like the more famous San Andreas fault story in California, is drug out from time to time to remind people that we are all going to die soon.
Maybe, maybe not might be a good title for this book as well. The articles are broken down into a semi logical order and the fun bit is the re-written Headlines for the stories. Clearly I have been Farking totally wrong. Have no Farking idea what I have been doing. And have not been Farking properly at all. I need to write witty Headlines to my submissions. Hmm…well, maybe not.
Shoemoney thinks you get more traffic from StumbleUpon than from Fark. My personal experience has been that Digg beats all of them six ways to Sunday, and I mean ALL of them. Daily Mantra seems to hate Fark, but really just wants to ignore it.
