Want to get lots of traffic to your blog, and hundreds of comments from readers? Post something in which you speculate about how terrorists could attack the U.S. — and then ask your readers for their own suggestions. Better still, post this at the New York Times website.<\/p>\n
I missed it when it originally happened last week, but that’s pretty much what the two Steves — that is, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt — did over at Freakonomics<\/a>, which recently became part of the NYT web operation (I wrote about the fuss over them adopting partial RSS feeds here<\/a>, a topic that was later taken up<\/a> by my friend Mike Masnick at Techdirt).<\/p>\n Levitt, who is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, wrote about “what I would do to maximize terror if I were a terrorist with limited resources.”<\/em> After laying out some of his thoughts about different approaches, he said: “I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure many readers have far better ideas. I would love to hear them. Consider that posting them could be a form of public service.”<\/em><\/p>\n Almost 600 commenters didn’t see it that way<\/a>, however. Dozens wondered what on earth the subject had to do with economics, while others said posting such ideas was reprehensible. The post generated an editorial<\/a> in the New York Post, a scathing blog entry<\/a> by my friend Rachel Sklar at The Huffington Post and a follow-up post in which Levitt tried to explain himself<\/a> (a little). The latter has so far gotten about 300 or so comments.<\/p>\n Damn — I wish I’d thought of that \ud83d\ude42 I’m sure there will be those who believe this was a deliberate strategy to boost readership, but I doubt it — I think Levitt is just like that, which is part of what makes the blog so thought-provoking. Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis uses the post as part of an argument<\/a> for why he thinks blogs should be affiliated with newspapers rather than “owned.”<\/p>\n