Dan Bialek Hates MySpace

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on January 9th, 2008

It’s a statement of fact and it’s the title of Dan Bialek‘s latest MySpace profile! We’ll let him tell the story (from DBHMS):

My name is Dan Bialek. I was the number one ranked comedian on the Myspace Top Comedian rankings from October 27, 2007 to January 8, 2008 when Myspace deleted my account after I made fun of two of their most famous comedians in a blog article on an unrelated site.

To become number one I used a process called “viewjacking.” A lot of comedians on Myspace use it to inflate their video counts and place themselves higher on the Myspace Top Comedian charts than they should be. Myspace knew about it for weeks (probably months) before they deleted my profile. A lot of their “top” comedians still featured on their site still use it today to bolster their positions on the site.

He goes on in some detail about his contempt for MySpace Comedy and how their system is, to put it mildly, corrupt.

He also includes a video that “will show you and anyone else who has a high speed internet connection and a spare computer lying around how to become 1 on Myspace Comedy and how to get millions of video views for free.”

Although the blog entry he references is rather dour, his YouTube video is simlutaneously subversive and cheerful! Bialek is delightfully upbeat while urging the potential destruction of a slice of MySpace! (And, if we get our profiles bumped off of MySpace for driving people to it, we’ll find him on his tour and kick his ass!)

But seriously, Bialek has pointed out what everyone has known all along: The internet is wondrous, but it is also so susceptible to manipulation– by the artist, the fan and the conglomerate– that such fantasies as “Comedian of the Month” or online comedy contests are about as credible as 1950s-era “nationwide talent searches” or swooning bobbysoxers or brawls at a heavyweight fight weigh-in.

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