There's a familiar story about a mouse hitting a button, maybe red, to get dosed with cocaine. It does so, consistently, in preference to food and sex.

I prefer to think of the button as being a mouse button. And instead of cocaine, there's the Internet. Some mice have a simple mouse manufactured by an elitist fruit company, but the vast majority of mice have a Swiss knife of a mouse. It's got a minimum of 3 buttons, and one of them scrolls content up and down on a receptacle that, no matter how large, always seems too small. In fact, if there was a way to crawl into the receptacle I imagine the problem with these mice would be short-lived.

But that's the Internet. Publishers are driven through by the number of clicks their content gets and - sometimes - even the quality of the clicks if that makes any sense. Thus, publishers typically cut their content into smaller pieces so that the mice have to click through more links to get their doses of content. Each click is some revenue for the publisher. Click. Click. Click. And the majority of the mice, even hearing the urban legend of how they are just revenue streams for publishers, continue to click no matter the quality or quantity of the content. Click. Click. Click.

Seeing this and knowing that publishers needed tools so that they could manage their content better and be able to add doses more quickly, the weblog was created. It was hailed as a great victory for mice everywhere since one could not only get one's doses - one could become one of the cool mice. The cool mice also profited from the recursive clicking. What they did was found what they considered to be high yield dosages and through their own publishing made the other not-so-cool mice into revenue streams. All by scoring the better dope that was already out there; very rarely did these blog-mice contribute anything but maps to where to score good dope. The not-so-cool mice, maybe close to this level of sentience, tried to copy the cool mice and ended up - get this - pointing to the blog-mice who pointed at the narcotic content.

Because of the algorithms of the search engines for this addictive content, the more links that went to a site would increase it's likelihood of being a top result. And so the not-so-cool mice inadvertently - and perhaps stupidly - made the cool mice even more... cool. This was further substantiated by even more real money and all the glory that went with being a drug dealer - except being shot at and having to deal with low life mice (except in comments on their blogs).

Then someone started calling them alpha bloggers, or alpha mice. The super-cool alpha mice publicly denied the existence of super-cool alpha mice. Imagine pulling the curtain to see the Wizard of Oz and instead seeing a few thousand mice searching the Internet for their next intellectual high. Crazy, right?

In the parallel universe of what we'll call the real world, advertising schmucks ate all of this up and competed for space on all manner of sites that dealt in the addictive drug of compelling content - no matter how cheesy it was. This created a bit of an economic bubble - but the bubble itself was only geographically linked to areas with Internet access and disposable income. Unless you're completely new to the planet, or are one of the metaphorical blind mice (stay away from clocks), you'll know that the majority of the world still doesn't have Internet access. Disposable income is not an urban legend. For the minority of mice, anyway. Stop laughing or we'll turn off your Internet access.

A few studious mice were watching internet penetration and realized that when the majority of users were no longer from places with a high portion of disposable income, things would change. The content would change. So they muddled along and allowed the Internet to evolve at it's own pace. Still others wanted to accelerate the process of making the content drug more geographically homogeneous, and they got funding from well intentioned mice to get geographically funded narcotic content more available. This differed from the alpha mice in that they didn't directly derive income from the viewing mice. But the more successful they were, the easier it was for them to get more funding to do what they were doing - and in the end, they really are just a different flavor of alpha mice. They point, and mice all over the world click. Click. Click. Click.

And even as this happened, some mice figured out how to trap more of the other mice by creating websites based on the affinity of mice for... mice. They called this social networking, and the creators were social networking entrepeneurs. Or, social networking entrepreneurial mice who were apparently paying attention to the prehistoric Internet Forum mice and how they behaved. At first, they showed videos and pictures. Then more comprehensive sites showed up - some for professional mice. Another, based on software made for college mice (who, let's face it, are really just trying to get laid), also became highly used. Instead of LaidBook, they decided on Facebook. And they took all that was learned from previous entrepreneurial mice and made it so that mice who would not have otherwise posted their narcotic (and sometimes toxic) content on the Internet now could and would do it - to be cool, and maybe in the hope of getting laid on top of it.

While all of this was happening, the rest of the world fell in love with the mobile phone and text messages. So another group of entrepreneurial mice turned this into a social network as well. Reflecting on the type of users that they would have, they decided to name their network Twitter. Smaller doses of content, more clicks! Click, click, click. There are rumors of mice out there with electron microscopes trying to shave the content even further down so that even more clicks will be generated, but at this time the 'Tweet' is the ultimate division of narcotic content that, typically, just points somewhere else. Somewhere, someone is using Twitter to Tweet about what someone blogged that points to something else that, ultimately, might have some worthwhile narcotic content. Clickety Click Click. Scroll, scroll, scroll.

Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition recent global upheaval in other areas of the real world. Specifically, the failure of the U.S. economy triggering an international incident the likes of which made 9/11 seem infinitesimal. For the record, this was mainly caused by some mice reselling other people's bad debts, repeatedly, relabeling them as different sorts of investments. If that's not terrorism, I don't know what is. Talk about collateral damage.

So suddenly there was less disposable income, and this didn't bode well for the mice who were generating income from other mice looking for content. It's sort of like some mice are getting paid to make the walls for the maze to slow down the other mice finding the cheese while saying (mice do talk, you know) that they are trying to make it easier for other mice. Brilliant! But suddenly the wall building market is in trouble, so they had to start paying more attention or end up... being just like the other mice. And so there's a great debacle over Developing Nation mice and their drag on content. What that all really translates to is that the mice who designed everything didn't cater for foreign mice because they insanely believed that they weren't coming despite all the invitations they kept sending them. Dumb mice, maybe, but there it is.

And so, now, the economic bubble having almost completely burst, a lot of smart mice and a lot more dumb mice are trying to figure out how you, gentle mouse, can generate them enough revenue to keep them in business and move them ahead.

And it's all based on clicks. And those clicks are to the narcotic content you're hopelessly addicted to so that other people can find more ways for you to click more, thus creating more revenue for them.

Thanks for clicking.