Book 1: Feeding the monster : how blogs work. Blogs make the news ; How to turn nothing into something in three way-too-easy steps ; The blog con : how publishers make money online ; Tactic #1: Bloggers are poor; help pay their bills ; Tactic #2: Tell them what they want to hear ; Tactic #3: Give them what spreads, not what's good ; Tactic # 4: Help them trick their readers ; Tactic #5: Sell them something they can sell (exploit the one-off problem) ; Tactic #6: Make it all about the headline ; Tactic #7: Kill 'em with pageview kindness ; Tactic #8: Use the technology against itself ; Tactic #9: Just make stuff up (everyone else is doing it) -- Book 2: The monster attacks : what blogs mean. Irin Carmon, The Daily Show, and me: the perfect storm of how toxic blogging can be ; There are others : the manipulator hall of fame ; Cute but evil : online entertainment tactics that drug you and me ; The link economy : the leveraged illusion of sourcing ; Extortion via the Web : facing the online shakedown ; The iterative hustle : online journalism's bogus philosophy ; The myth of corrections ; Cheering on our own deception ; The dark side of snark : when Internet humor attacks ; The 21st-century degradation ceremony : blogs as machines of hatred and punishment ; Welcome to unreality ; How to read a blog : an update on account of all the lies -- Conclusion: So--where to from here?

Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-248) and index.