My Eyes! My Eyes!

You may have noticed the toolbar at the top of my blog. It has a small search engine that lets you search only in my blog, a button to the Blogger homepage, and a button called "Next Blog", which randomly opens one of the gajillion other blogs hosted by Blogger.

I love this button. I can sit and click it for ages. I've surfed onto some very cool blogs that way. I've seen blogs written in many other languages. A surprising number of them are written in Icelandic, especially considering the fact that there are less than half a million Icelanders. It seems like everyone in Iceland must have a blog on Blogger. Surprisingly few of them are written in French or German.

I have a few simple rules for use of the "Next Blog" button. First, any blog that uses "133t" speak orTyPeS LiKe ThIs is to be clicked past as quickly as possible. Ditto any blog that plays music. I also refuse to read any blog like the one I saw last night written in such poor English that the author should be hunted down and sent to prison for Felonious Assault on a Language. And no, I don't mean people who are obviously not native speakers of English. I mean the blogs whose authors "rite stuffe like thiz...they like 2 think it's kuul, they shud no better". And the bottom of the barrel, as far as I'm concerned, is any blog that attempts to download something to your computer. Otherwise, I don't particularly care what people choose to write about or where they're from or what the name of the blog is. You either like the stuff they write or you don't-- either way, they'll keep on blogging and no one will ever force you to read something you don't want to.

It's really kind of cool to see exactly what people like to blog about. Some blogs are intensely personal, others more facetious. I found a bunch of 1L blogs the other day and spent hours reading them, laughing (in a "it's funny 'cause it's true" and a "been there, done that" kind of way) at the progression that many of them show from their entries in August ("I love law school! It's so challenging and invigorating! I know I'm smarter than all of my classmates!") to the entries at the end of September ("Oh my God, I have so much work to do! The reading is killing me. And why are the profs so mean to us?"). Many of them are also beginning their first Legal Research and Writing assignment-- the Closed Research Memo-- and are muy stressados about that. All I can say is, I can't wait for the entries when they finish their first set of exams and get the grades. A little cruel perhaps, but again, it's that recognition of one's own foibles that makes it funny. A laughing through the tears kind of laugh.

But today, thanks to the wonder that is "Next Blog", I accomplished what years of experience on the Internet and wanton Googling of just about anything you can imagine could not do for me: I accidentally pulled up porn.

Well, OK, it's sort of not the first time it happened. The first time I was only a bystander, though. One of my collegues and I were organizing a "Hole-In-One" contest at a charity golf outing and needed to order one of those little collapsable plastic tents that you can set up to provide shade. Cee was pretty sure that she'd seen them at Dick's Sporting Goods, so we decided to check their website and see if we could have it delivered... I'm sure you can fill in the next part of the story yourself. Did I mention that our boss and the owner of the company was a very conservative Catholic who would break into a nervous sweat at the mention of any topic that might suggest that people have naked bodies under their clothes or bodily functions of any sort? Did I also mention that he was in the building, in his office, directly in the line of sight of the computer screen, while this was happening? And of course, we were both so shocked that we started screaming with laughter, hissing at each other "Turn it off! Get it off the screen!". Ah, good times. Let that be a lesson to you: never assume that the company's name + .com = a valid url for that company.

So anyway, here I am, luckily at home and not, say, in the student lounge, and I click "Next Blog", and what should appear on my screen? A blog whose first entries included pictures of a young girl "wearing" nothing but a bra. I put "wearing" in quotes because it was posed to look like the bra might slip off (oopsie) at any second. It was nothing more than a thinly veiled advertisement for a pay porn site and was so stupid that I had to laugh hysterically for five full minutes. I clicked "Next Blog" again and thought the story was over, a cute little anecdote to tell my friends tomorrow. But, in the words of Dave Barry, I am NOT making this up, in the next half hour, I clicked into two more thinly veiled ads. All three were under the same user name and had been started in the last two days or so.

I wonder if some smut peddler decided that putting up a whole slew of "blogs" would be good advertising. It's free, right? Of course, I would think it would be difficult to reach your target audience. But then again, I would guess that it's no less effective than spamming people. I also wonder if it's against the Blogger Terms of Service?