Any blog-themed site operated correctly can develop a cult following and become successful, regardless of the subject matter. This concept is accurately embodied by Engrish.com, which essentially functions as a celebration of the mangling of the English language by foreign people. The model is set up so that users, in their everyday travels, take & submit pictures of signs, products, notes, books, etc. written by people who don’t have quite the grasp of the English language that we do. The top pictures are then posted to the blog and rated by the rest of the Engrish.com community. The theme of the entire site is to poke fun at foreign representations of our language, and the site contains a “brog”, “massage board”, and “shopping occurs!” section. Here are some of the funnier Engrish.com entries.
Collectively, our generation is easily addicted to notable people. Anyone with even a small amount of reputation is clung to by the masses like some sort of savior. People absolutely can’t get enough of celebrities and pop culture icons. But fifteen years ago, in order to achieve this level fame, you actually had to be really good at something. However, the advent of online streaming video, particularly YouTube, has made it much easier to achieve global reputation and be known by millions. Notably hilarious videos quickly become “viral”, meaning that they achieve popularity at an incredible rate due to the abundant networking opportunities created by the internet. Basically, is now possible to become quickly famous simply by being really dumb. Which I think is great. The following are three people who have been launched into a lifestyle of fame and recognition (either good or bad) simply by being stupid in front of a camera.
1. Star Wars Kid
On November 4, 2002, a Canadian teenager named Ghyslain Raza decided to use his school’s video camera to film himself using a golf ball retriever as a star wars light saber to fight off imaginary enemies while making his own dramatic sound effects. He then made the life-altering mistake of leaving this footage on the camera, which some fellow students quickly found and immediately uploaded to the internet. To his dismay, this 2-minute long video quickly exploded all over the internet, and has since become the most viral video of all-time, amassing over a billion views on numerous platforms while inspiring hundreds upon hundreds of parodies.
2. Miss Teen South Carolina
The setting: Miss Teen USA Pageant, 2007:
Host: “Recent polls have shown that a fifth of Americans can’t locate the US on a world map. Why do you think this is?”
Miss Teen South Carolina “I personally believe, that U.S. Americans, are unable to do so, because uh, some ,people out there, in our nation don’t have maps, and uh, I believe that our education like such as in South Africa, and the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should uh, our education over here, in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa, and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for our children.”
This monumental lack of on-the-spot intelligence has launched young Miss Lauren Caitlin Upton into a life of fame, allowing her the opportunity to appear on NBC’s The Today Show, attend the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards (where she parodied her own response), numerous television advertisements, and The Amazing Race 16, on which she is currently a contestant. The video has been viewed over 130 million times on various mediums.
3. Boom Goes the Dynamite
This colossal crash-and-burn of a college sportscast quickly became an internet sensation in 2005 after Brian Collins, a former sportscaster for KXXV television in Waco, Texas, agreed to fill in for the regular sportscaster (who was sick) on the Ball State University Campus Newscast. What ensued is widely considered one of the biggest bloopers in sports history. A malfunctioning teleprompter led to a massively awkward and uncomfortable sportscast, the proportions of which are likely to never be seen again. The disaster, however, was redeemed by Collins’ oddly-inserted catchphrase “Boom Goes the Dynamite” which, due to the viral nature of the video, became quickly famous and has been used extensively in sports culture since the incident. This on-air catastrophe netted Collins a great deal of notoriety and even landed him an appearance on The Late Show.
In an internet environment where content is king, creating good content rapidly enough to continually drive your viewers back to your site is tedious and sometimes impossible. That’s why the most successful websites are the ones that allow/encourage their users to submit their own content. Ten years ago, it would have been crazy to assume that you can make money (and lots of it) off of a product that your customers create. However, with the emergence of Web 2.0, this concept is commonplace. The new challenge lies in creating scenarios/engines that motivate customers to contribute or create content that others actually want to see. A simple idea can utilize humor, social networking or simple conversation to inspire web users to submit and post content onto your website that will effectively sell your site for you.
This concept is embodied by the popular blog-style site failblog.org, created in January 2008 (Link not included because content is occasionally inappropriate). Users can submit pictures or videos of various “failures”. “Failures” are characterized by a general lack of success, particularly a stupid or embarrassing mistake that someone or some group of people has made. It can also be a random misfortune, accident or mishap that happens to befall somebody and consequently be electronically documented. Each documentation of failure is humorously captioned with a variety of the word “fail”.
To date, users have submitted an enormous amount of content. Each “fail” is rated/commented on by thousands, and significantly funny entries receive large amounts of attention from the populous failblog community. This site keeps itself going, and reels in tens of thousands of users daily as they check in to catch the latest fails. By exploiting failure, failblog.org is a humongous success.
Here is a link to display all G-rated failblog entries. Check it out for yourself. G-Rated Fail Blog
…Just check it out for yourself. There are hundreds of millions of web sites available to any internet user, but the Sexy People Blog very well may be the coolest of them all. This site tags itself as “A celebration of the perfect portrait”, and features hundreds of amazing, awkward portrait photos of an interesting variety of people dating all the way back to the 1960’s. That’s all there is to it. Users can browse through the extensive collection of photographs and laugh hysterically at what was considered cool 5, 10, 20, 30 or even 40 years ago. This website, by having taken a hilarious concept and milked it for all it’s worth, has successfully developed a very loyal cult following. It goes without saying that this website is worth checking out yourself, but nonetheless I have taken the liberty of compiling & linking to what I believe to be some of the top photos on sexypeople-blog.com.
We are a different class of college students every Spring. Together we explore what it means to do business in a "Web 2.0" world. Technology, new businesses, cutting-edge trends, we cover them all!
We are a different class of college students every Spring. Together we explore what it means to do business in a "Web 2.0" world. Technology, new businesses, cutting-edge trends, we cover them all! 
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