Gonzo marketing

Homeland Stupidity? I’m really intrigued. Not so much by sites with cool and irreverent names, but by their Gonzo Marketing techniques (I loved that book). I should link to the author but do I pick his evil alter ego Rage Boy or his grown up *boring* Wired magazine, Cluetrain Manifesto editor link- guess which one I picked?

Not only does Homeland Stupidity have a funny Domain Name, but they also have anti-marketing on their site such as:

“Entertaining and insightful” — Jim Harper, director of information policy studies, Cato Institute

“Patently ridiculous” — Markos Moulitsas, Democratic pundit

Can you see a major Aussie companies having crap reviews featured on their main page? Like Google embracing and pre-installing the widget/gadget that rates Is Google Evil? Perhaps a Microsoft would sue (web 1.0), whereas a Google puts it on your personalised home page (Web 2.0). I do like The Spin Starts Here, an Aussie multi-author-blog site. They have *negative* press that they quote on their main page. I think the module (box) that intros Adsense (Google Ads) says something like “Yeah, well, we sold out. So what.” You might as well say it, as negatively as possible, because the dialogue is with the consumer now and you might just mitigate a major bun fight by doing it.

BTW, my little darlin’s, Homeland Stupidity has Bad Behaviour:

Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots. It goes far beyond User-Agent and Referer, however. Bad Behavior is available for several PHP-based software packages, and also can be integrated in seconds into any PHP script.

The fact that they title the page…

Bad Behavior / Bad Behaviour

…makes me love ’em more. Yep, they’ve got their priorities all RIGHT (or WRONG depending on your view). Ridiculous domain name, pissy reviews, but cater for international spellings. And kill spam. Bless. Anti-marketing in action.

Oh and it’s one of the ugliest WordPress sites I’ve seen in a while. I actually thought it was tikiwiki, it was so bad. 😛