Some people are talking about boycotting the olympics because of China's human rights issues. I assume the plan is to not watch the olympics and not buy any olympic merchandise. But I think it might be more effective to boycott them on the internet. For example:
- During the olympics, don't mention the olympics on the internet, not even in passing. (Unless someone comes up with a good googlebombing.) Don't blog about them. Ideally everyone should blog about human rights instead (without mentioning the olympics at all), but that's a very demanding blog topic, so blog about anything else instead. The goal is to make it look like no one cares about the olympics at all. We don't want them to show up as a trend in Google Trends. It would be beautiful if human rights were getting exponentially more internet attention than the olympics, but it would also be quite helpful there were more posts like "Look at my new haircut!" and "OMG PUPPY!" and "Today I ate a sandwich" than there were about the olympics.
- Don't read any online articles about the olympics. Not even in the newspaper. Don't click through to anything. Do read all articles about human rights (or, if you don't feel like reading them, click on them so they get hits) and click on all their ads. No one should get any hits or ad revenue for writing about the olympics.
The beauty of this technique is that, if you really want to, you can still watch the olympics. I think TV still uses the sample household reporting system to determine ratings (please do correct me if I'm wrong) so you can turn on your TV without anyone noticing. You can still read about the olympics in the print version of the newspaper and no one will ever know. But on the internet, where it is remarkably easy for people to gather information about what gets them read, it will look like no one cares about the olympics at all.
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