When London PR blogger Melanie Seasons started her blog two and a half years ago, the subject of her first post was her first post from her MySpace blog. In fact, she took most of her content from there as well. She calls her first post “a cop-out first post of another first post”, but I think that she might have spun it as a “metapost”.

In some ways, the post you’re reading now could be another metapost — a post about first posts. But it’s really about new ways of working.

I know about Melanie’s first post because I’ve been carrying out some quantitative research using first posts. I took a user-generated list of UK PR blogs that I helped curate last October, and attempted to identify the date of the first ever post for each blog.

This is a task that’s almost impossible to automate. Getting the newest post is a cinch for a computer – the oldest post not so much. And yet it’s relatively simple for a human to perform the task – generally it’s just boring and repetitive (although I challenge you to find the first post on Jed Hallam’s blog, Rock Star PR). I’m not one of those people who enjoys repetitive tasks, so I decided to take this opportunity to set up the Magic Bean Lab’s first experiment; to test the efficiency of various alternative labour sources.
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