by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/06/17 12:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/06/17/3349316.aspx
David Beaver of Language Log, that is1.
And his recent post Confused? Read on..., which although it does not explain the reasoning behind the posts on this blog, certainly does delve into the real nature of most headlines in both print and online media, and gives lie to Robert Scoble's claim that blog post titles that are not functional are less than ideal. People generally want to tease and entice people into reading further, and the purely functional won't usually be the best way to do that.
I myself usually choose titles for how amusing I think they are, and because of this they often take more time to write than the actual posts they sit atop of. Perhaps they will draw readers, though on the whole I think they usually only draw in readers who were going to read the posts anyway.
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1 - I suppose it could have been a reference to those Rozerem ads on TV about drugging oneself asleep to facillitate playing chess with Abe Lincoln and the talking beaver (I'd probably need to be drugged to go to sleep if I knew my dreams were gonna be like that!). But my blog is not about that particular weird ad campaign....