In the real world, people’s products get blurbed. On the Internet people are their own products, so people get blurbed. Today I found this guy who put one of my videos on his blog. He didn’t review the video–he reviewed me:

Adrian Chen seems like a nice guy. he just seems a little eccentric. he’s like the crazy funny guy but goes a bit too far but not too far that he kills the fun at a party and people leave having been stripped of their pride and little teary eyed but man enough to hang out just a bit longer to show adrian he’s not the reason they have to leave but that their friend got hurt in a horrific do-it-yourself helicopter crash, you know what i mean?

I’m unsure about what to do about this. It’s funny and maybe accurate (you be the judge!), but do I put it under my ‘press clippings’ or do I get it tattooed on the back of my neck? And most importantly: Did he like my video?

And even more importantly: If regular people are going to be getting blurbed and reviewed all the time on the Internet, we need a system for sorting through the dreck and getting at what strangers truly think about the people (we think) we know. Maybe it could be like Rotten Tomatoes for people, or Amazon reviews, or just a well calibrated system of weights and measures. I mean, we could definitely have the wrong opinion about our loved ones! (cf. Clark Rockefeller)

Hopefully the wisdom of the crowd will align with our personal ignorance, and we will eventually only know and fuck people who score 98% on the Tomatometer and have a “0″ on the STDometer. Not to mention a “low” on the Will-kill-you-with-a-pickax-ometer. (Or maybe a “medium” on the will-kill-you-with-a-pickax-ometer, but a “0″ in the number-of-pickaxes-owned-ometer.)

Anyway, I’m not complaining. I like being blurbed. I like people writing about me as much as I like writing about people writing about me. For all the great shit she wrote, I bet Virginia Woolf was never blurbed, personally, on a blog, on the Internet.

And that, dear reader, is why I am a better writer than Ginnie Woolf.