What to Blog On?

The internet is a fascinating place. It's more or less a given fact that no matter what you may be interested in finding, more than likely there's already at least one page (if not dozens more) dedicated to it on the web. There are many topics that seem to draw the interest of readers and blogs are only the latest iteration of the effort to get that 'knowledge' out to the people. Blogs (short for 'web logs') have been around for a while now and they started off as minor pages that people maintained for personal amusement or to spread general bits of knowledge. Some of the famous ones out there quickly became popular for their content or characteristics. The website "Ain't it Cool News" is one that comes to mind.

That site was started by a movie fan named Harry Knowles who became world famous for his spy reports on movies in production or out for test screening. He's gotten so much clout and press that these days many studios and producers and directors use his input and opinions to determine early on whether a movie will appeal to an audience or not. Though he sometimes seems to have sold out, giving stellar reviews to movies which are sub-par at best, his site still manages to draw on a lot of browsers. I am definitely one of them. But though you can call the site a news site, it is in essence an early version of a blog. He's got a steady stream of stories to deal with since movie-making rarely goes away. But what about something off the beaten path?

I have been maintaining my site for close to two years now and in that time I have covered a wide gamut of topics. I've often been asked why I don't focus on a particular subject and I simply feel that by pigeon-holing myself to a particular topic or theme, I'll end up limiting my audience and I'm hoping to avoid that. There are days when I get tons (relatively speaking) of hits. When I wrote about the discovery of a new planet for example, for whatever reason, when you did a Google search for the planet, my blog came up first (even before NASA). Surprisingly enough I ended up there for a very long time and it brought tons of people to the site. The second most popular topic was of course Tysons Corner. For people in Washington it's important for a lot of things; at present, those things include the Metro and shopping. I still get hits on that topic despite having written it a long time ago. People are always on the look out for something unusual and Christian Lander, a Canadian copywriter living in Los Angeles hit on something that seems to have been the proverbial gold pot at the end of the rainbow (hey... we're still close enough to St. Patrick's Day to make a leperachaun reference).

During the course of a web chat, one of Lander's friends asked the simple question, "what do white people like". They came up with a short list and Lander created a blog dealing with the subject on a whim. Suddenly he was getting hundreds and then thousands and now millions of hits. I'm sure some of you will also go and search out his site as well. The thing that surprises me more is that while the topic is pretty much innocent and pokes blatant fun at caucasian cultural quirks, there doesn't seem to have been a major fallout as yet on the fact that had this been any other race except for white, there would be a major brouhaha calling for the immediate shutting down of this site. Having read some of his posts on the page, I can attest to the fact that the site does have some great humor and it's definitely a funnier slant on some eccentricities that people have.

Now whether all these things are true are not remains to be seen. It also remains to be seen whether or not this site will last much longer now that it is getting more press coverage. What amazes me more though is that someone has taken a seemingly insulting concept for a blog and turned it into something popular. I'm sure word of mouth must have helped and occasional articles like the one in the Washington Post about this site (or even my little blog) are probably helping him spread the word. But even before that happened, there were enough hits on the site to get him close to a million hits. That means that people are looking for it and if they're looking for it in that many numbers, perhaps it's because people have a keen interest in the topic or are simply curious. I'm seriously waiting for the racial fallout from this to come to pass but I'm assuming because this will be seen as 'white people making fun of white people' there won't be a big thing made of it. I find that to be a double standard, but hey, the web is free for all. Do as you please I suppose.