The problems with anonymity, the Internet and being unknown

A couple of stories came across my desk today that I found to be important. By the way, I don't really have a desk where stories come across it, or even a place where something like that would ever happen. I'm lucky if I can find a story after an exhaustive search on the Internet. But it sure sounds good saying it because I like to think I'm as important as those big guys that have stories that come across their desks. Anyway, so this series of stories came across my big, Oak desk today, forcing me to push aside my security briefings from the President so I could focus on them. What? It could happen. Really. Anyway...

The first of the stories was about a young woman who got outed on the Internet by telling all of her blog fans that she was who she was. We all know the story: Boy meets girl. Girl meets alien. Alien destroys most of Manhattan before we find out it was really just looking for a gas station. Oh wait, different story. Sorry. In this story, here, Virginia Montanez, was writing a blog that criticized the Mayor of Pittsburgh. People were starting to figure out who she was, so she outed herself to avoid having someone else out her first. Boy, she showed them! And then her job fired her. Turns out she worked for a nonprofit that probably didn't like being seen as the employers of someone who made fun of the mayor, and well, we know how that sort of thing works out.

Yesterday, after Kat and I finished fighting off ninjas that were trying to destroy Union City, we went to see the movie Julie and Julia. It was a cute movie about a young woman who decides to cook her way through Julia Child's famous cook book. I won't get into the details to avoid ruining the movie for you, but at some point the aliens do fight back and we end up with a great cliffhanger where evil supermonkeys save Paris by stopping the evil Dr. Massachusetts. Or something like that. Anyway, the movie itself was actually pretty good, but something about it really bothered me. It's based on a true story, from the perspective of the young woman who wrote the book/screenplay, and what bothers me is that she was an unsuccessful writer who couldn't get her book published and gave up on writing, but then somehow made it famous by writing a blog about cooking.

Now, I've been writing a blog for years now, and aside from two other people, my stuffed animals are the only ones who read it, and that's just what they tell me to avoid an awkward evening alone with me when I confront them about it. Part of the joke of the movie is how only her mother reads her blog, but then out of nowhere, suddenly she's got the most successful blog since Hitler blogged about his trip across Europe in the early 1940s.

How does this happen? Why do some people have the most popular blogs on the planet, yet the rest of us can't seem to get a reader even if we kidnap people and put them in front of a computer that only goes to my blog with its browser? Believe me. I tried it, and somehow they managed to find lesbian porn instead of my site, and I fixed the computer to ONLY go to my site. I just don't understand.

So, one of the things that bothered me was that the moral of the story seems to be that if you can't get published as a regular writer, do something outrageous and ridiculous, blog about it, and then you'll have a writing career. Does anyone else have a problem with that? I ask that figuratively because I realize that my stuffed animals are the only ones reading, and they just stare blankly, like they are too cool to give an answer of their own. Stupid stuffed animals and their "I'm better than you are" airs they put on!

Stumble It!