Many years ago the late Alan Coren published one of his very funny collections of anecdotes and daily columns. The book had a swastika on the front, and was called Golfing for Cats. He explained that the publishers were worried about his sales, and that only books about sports, the Nazis and pets got really big sales. So that was Mr Coren’s amusingly ironic response.

The anecdote goes to show that idiots in publishing are not unique to our era. When I first submitted my stuff to an agent years ago, he wrote back ‘Who are you like?’ in a typically idle and genre-obsessed attempt to file me under something. I wrote back, ‘I have my father’s eyes and my mother’s chin’.

But what’s new in this epoch is all those braindead sites explaining How to Get Hits, advice which seems to coincide almost entirely with How to Bore Your Readers Shitless And Write Very Badly.

It’s all about tags, we’re told: slip in tons of tags, and the world really will beat a path to your site. This is fine if you’re selling furniture, because you can tag chairs, tables, sofas, beds and uniquely matching hand-crafted nest of tables. If you’re trying to say something new about society and deconstruct bollocks, tagging everything ‘society bollocks’ is going to attract the same audience as Hello.

Despite this, I do know of folks who write on this basis. So in a gap before humanitarian flotillas and between economic disasters last week, I went to the Technorati site in search of what was hot in hits. These were the Top Tags that day:

‘Obama, Paris Hilton, Iphone, David Laws, BP spillage, North Korea’

Anyway, this posting is going to use those tags, and there follows a headline living up to their promise. I will check out the hits and get back to you.