The AOL-ization of TechCrunch headlines continues apace.

More technically, SEO-ified titles like this are a great example of Goodhart's law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Techcrunch is going to lose its audience with posts like this over time because they are improperly using a global trend ("Rebecca Black") to attract a local audience (fairly technical/entrepreneurial crowd, or used to be).

One possible technical solution would be for Facebook to launch Facebook Trends, such that you could start cross-sectioning Google Trends by demographic. This would mean blogs could stop going for lowest common denominator stuff and start at least putting together linkbait titles optimized for their intended audience.

[Of course, this only works if the global strategy actually is suboptimal relative to the local audience strategy. Empirical question.]

TechCrunch is dead to me, and was long before AOL bought them. The AOL purchase was simply public acknowledgment that the fix was in.

The article seems unnecessarily harsh, frankly. It's easy to forget in all of this that Black is still 13 years old.

Being young doesn't (and shouldn't) give you a pass in life, in any industry. For a HN crowd example: just because you started your first company in high school doesn't mean it's any more or less legitimate than one started by college students. Results and talent should be the measure of success. The article simply points out the 'results' and 'talent' of the Ms. Black...

I'm not saying she should get a pass in life. I'm saying that mercilessly mocking a teenager for failing at something like this is just out of line.

Rebecca Black is the gift that keeps on giving. Here's another business idea...get kids parents to spend $2000 and then produce their kid's music videos.