Today’s short was inspired by a video that I originally saw while looking through YouTube, it’s called “Internet People” and it gives a pretty extensive rundown of web memes. It also inspired me to revive one of my favorite posts from the past, the big list of Internet Archetypes. First, lets see that video.

Internet People

Archetypes

Troll

Tagline: “LOL, I HaXX0red j00r w0rld”

Favorite Beverage: Mountain Dew

The internet is his soapbox, and he loves nothing more than to prove that to you. If you write a post, you’re obviously wrong. If you comment on his work, he’ll tear into you for every comma splice or logical fallacy. He lives and breaths the flame war, and just wishes that he didn’t get that bad carpel tunnel every time he typed more than a three page polemic on why Deep Space Nine was vastly superior to Voyager. He’s smart, crafty and knows just how to turn a perfectly functional internet community into a snarling, yapping pile of waste.

Most of his favorite phrases include painful to read acronyms interspersed amongst grammatical unarguable, but excruciatingly pompous prose. He feeds on the pain of others, and wants nothing more than to shape the internet in his own image. The Troll is most commonly found stalking the halls of forums; usually, Forums on topics like Microsoft/Apple or any video game console. He is the first person to drop the phrase, “Macbook Sucks” and the skitter off to parts unknown to kindle another fire.

SEO Expert

Tagline: “How can I help you explode your traffic!?”

Favorite Beverage: Grande Double Latte, hold the foam.

The master of convincing otherwise rational people that Search Engine Optimization is the hope, the truth and the light of internet communication. He posts long, rambling tirades about fool proof methods of increasing your traffic, and sells piles of eBooks and videos to help you do it. The SEO expert plays of the age old “Get Rich Quick” mentality. Most of the successful writers in this field got where they are not because of their tips, but because they were able to sell the promise of getting rich effectively.

The SEO expert often has between 5 and 10 sub-blogs, each with very little truly relevant content but with the sort of niche presence and keyword stuffing that has pushed it far enough the SERP to generate some pretty decent ad revenue. In a perfect world, the SEO expert would just develop a script to write half-way coherent prose and post it to the web every 30 minutes or so. Since this doesn’t tend to work, they fall back on pulling RSS feeds from across the web to fuel their chimeras.

The SEO Expert can post commonly be found prowling the dark corners of blog comments, looking for any opportunity to drop a link back to their site where Akismet can’t get to it.

Lurker

Tagline: “…”

Favorite Beverage: Evian Water

They are the obsessed readers of the web community. They travel the internet in search of truth and beauty and rarely ever give anything back. With speed reading talents honed and sharpened to perfection, these masters of the quick read are always at the bleeding edge of news and have no problem rehashing everything that has happened in their topic of choice from memory as long as they never have to leave a comment.

In those rare situations that they are forced to write something to the web, they do their best to mask it behind some complex, overly pedantic web handle that is often drawn from a dry, foreign film or obscure Victorian Literature.

Lurkers can be found everywhere and nowhere at once. They are most commonly discovered in office break rooms, during the middle of some rant about the iPhone.

Comentathore

Tagline: “Well, you see — due to an undefined and often misunderstood sentence that was removed from the original source material last weekend at 6PM, it’s quite obvious to me (and I really should know best) that your entire post is completely flawed. Let me enumerate some of the more salient details so that you ca…”

Favorite Beverage: Tea

Their comments are often longer than the posts they are writing about. They love to comment on others blogs, and draw nothing but joy from participating in the conversation. No strong blog community can exist without a few of these among its regular readers. They tend to read for substance, looking for just the right line to launch into a discussion, and they are always keeping up to date so that each comment is a work of art.

Since they often don’t write themselves, these webizens see comments as a quick and easy way to get an audience for their thoughts. They are on a first name basis with every blogger that you know, and probably read more posts to their completion than any other archetype. Unlike a Troll, irritating a comentathore won’t often lead to an explosive disagreement, but since they know your material just as well as you do, you better be ready to defend your mistake until time ends and the world grows cool. They can be your best friends, or your worst enemies and can be found anywhere their are five or more comments.

B-Lister

Tagline: “Quality, quantity and consistency.”

Favorite Beverage: Nothing (more time to write)

Not quite a part of the A-list, but they work as if they will be. These are the community builders and content providers of the new age. When you read their blogs, you are almost always left wishing they could write more. These are the part-time bloggers, with enough style and panache to make it big. Every post shows something other than the typical rehashing of old content. They have the greatest understanding of the web of any of the other archetypes. They write from experience and even when they are saying something that you may have seen before they do so with just enough flare that it seems like you’ve seen it for the first time.

B-Listers talk the talk, walk the walk but just lack the traffic to really show off their abilities. You will most often find B-Listers sitting around writing sterling prose for their own short list of blogs or crafting replies to every comment or email that makes its way across their field of view.

Feed Fiend

Tagline: “Wait, what’s your URL again?”

Favorite Beverage: V8 (it’s good for the eyes)

RSS is their one true friend. Instead of wasting the time actually visiting their favorite sites, the Feed Fiend simply adds it to their RSS. Hundreds, if not thousands of these feeds have been added,clogging their virtual universe and reducing the number of them they also read to almost zero. While the Feed Fiend is rarely ever really connected to your community, they are also the most likely to read all of your stories as they go live. With a thousand and one posts to read on an hourly basis they are also the most likely to forget where they actually got their information from.

The Feed Fiend will most commonly be found lurking around Technorati’s Top 100, Bloglines, Google Reader or any other site that will help them mediate information overload.

Social Media Optimizer

Tagline: “Can you Digg it!!!”

Favorite Beverage: Red Bull (for all night Digg sessions)

Digg is their middle name — no, it really is, they had it legally changed last week in order to make a Digg worthy post. These are the characters that keep social media running, or corrupt it beyond recognition — depending on how you wish to look at it. Their traffic statistics read like EKGs and their sense of morality has been tempered by the insatiable urge to Digg.

For them social media is a game, and they are the only ones clever enough to play it for all its worth. Their networks are extensive, and everyone from their old girlfriends to their dead grandma are on call for a midnight Digg. They measure their success by the number of useless articles they can get promoted to the front page of the social media of choice, and the number of rubes that they can drive to their sites as a result.

Social Media Optimizers can almost always be found defending their newly promoted posts in Reddit or Digg, making certain that any negative commentary gets deleted — where they believe it should be.

Guru

Tagline: “Have you heard of Rackspact? I know they’ve only been live for 2 hours, but I got into the private ALPHA a week ago. Man, I better get going — I have a sit down with their CEO later today.”

Favorite Beverage: Pinot Noir

If you want to know something before anyone else, go to the Guru. They have taken the internet and perfected it to the point that it is less a source of information and more like an art-form. They BETA test everything, know everyone and barely have enough time to write for themselves. Their real strengths are in their networks, through either previous fame or a fair amount of good luck they have managed to get on a first name basis with people in the know and now even the slightest blip of life on their blogs will cause a flood of traffic to see what new piece of dirt they have managed to dig up.

Guru’s are elusive creatures, but can most often be found at industry conferences and commenting on the boards of A-List bloggers.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Between Internet People and the archetypes what you have is a comprehensive internet travel guide. If you have any other pit stops to recommend or interesting natives to point out, be sure to contact me.

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