The New Yorker has done a profile of David "Shingy" Shing - and it's very funny

I somehow doubt your claim, Shingy!

I was bemused recently when page impressions for the two posts I wrote a while back about David Shing, AOL's Digital Prophet (no, honestly - that's his official title) suddenly spiked (you can find them here and here). Then, yesterday, I received an anonymous comment on one of them suggesting that the only reason I'd been so rude about Mr. Shing was that I was a jealous loser. So I googled the diminutive, shock-haired random word-generator and discovered that The New Yorker, no less, had just profiled America's - or Australia's - answer to Russell Brand when it comes to producing pure, unadulterated bollocks (and not in a noticeably manly way).

The only problem with the New Yorker piece is that it's far too short - barely blog-length - but, as Spencer Tracy remarked of Katharine Hepburn in Pat & Mike, “Not much meat on her, but what there is, is cherce”. Here, Shingy has just handed Erika Nardini, AOL's chief marketing officer, his iPad Mini:

‘Wanted to show you a little brain fart I had on the plane,’ he said. It was a cartoon he had drawn of a bear wearing zebra-print pants and a shirt covered in ones and zeros.

‘Love it, love it, love it,’ Nardini said. ‘I’m thinking of the bears more as a metaphor.’

‘A thousand per cent,’ Shingy said.

Brain fart. Gives a whole new meaning to the concept of a brain dump. You can read the article here.

It you want some more insights into the fascinating phenomenon that is Shingy, James Poulus of The Daily Beast is good on what "AOL's Goblin King" tells us about  corporate America - and ourselves (read it here).

One thing that suprises me is the number of times profilers mention the fact that The Shingster earns a six-figure salary, as if earning more than $100,000 is a big deal. Surely $1,000,000 a year would be too little to pay someone so willing to make such a humungous arse of themselves for the sake of self-publicity.