The Data Yodeler is a well-written—though ultimately lack-lustre—story of a fictional experiment in web-celebrity.  It’s a postmortem, in effect, of how the experiment came about, and "what went wrong". 

Russ decides to put his life on display, 18 hours a day, via blogging, twitter, photos, and video.  He finds a sponser—the Cheeky Bubble Gum company—hires a couple of people to help him run it, and starts blogging. The story muses on about the problems they ran into—generating content, getting noticed, keeping their sponsor happy, etc..

As I said at the top, the writing is quite good—although a little rambling, at times.  Ultimately, though, the story suffers from the same deficiency as its fictional experiment: not much happens, and it’s just not very interesting.  The installments are quite short and are easy to read.  Still, by the sixth or seventh episode, I found myself skimming.  By the twelfth, I had completely lost interest (there are 37 episodes available, at the time of this review). 

If you spend your day on Twitter, and can’t live without your Facebook account, you may well enjoy The Data Yodeler.  For the rest of us, well, Jon Stewart has already deconstructed this Twitter culture for us—find some recent clips from The Daily Show and you’ll enjoy yourself more.

1 of 2 members found this review helpful.
Help us improve!  Register or log in to rate this review.

My first thought? This is the perfect story to tell on the internet. A sponsored new media team creates a website hoping to become renowned, while also wrestling creative pressure, the anonymity of the internet and the demands of a corporate sponsor. It’s a story of what all our online novels hope to do, told in the format of an [more . . .]

This is a parody about blogging, media corruption and creativity, artistic vanity and loneliness.  Readers spend a lot of time with the uber-geeks, so if you like them you’ll enjoy this serial.

[more . . .]