Blogs hype people. Blogs hurt people.

Recently, my friend Lisa had to change the location of her wonderful blog because she was being hunted, well, electronically hunted, by the people in the small town in Alaska where she'd been writing from. I guess when you are an immigrant to a small town that claims only 1200 residents, you have to be a bit careful about what you write publicly. She was worried about gossip, and perpetuating a feeling of "us" verses "them", so the new blog has fallen entirely under the radar. I even searched for it myself under her full name, the name of the town she lives in, and other personal search criteria, but with 5 bazillion blogs on the blogspot.com server, I didn't come up with much.

I think this might be the only instance in which one wishes that their blog WON'T be found. (I'm so paranoid about exposing her that I am omitting any identifying details, since I could be the leak!) To the contrary, I wish mine to be spread around like a fire in the dry, wild Californian forests! (Sorry Californian buddies. Maybe once I come visit the West Coast [for the first time ever] and glimpse all the glorious redwoods, I'll be less quick to use such an analogy.)

There's something a little wicked, and a little illicit, about reading someone's blog when you know it's not intended for you. For the millions of people on Blogger, TypePad and other blog-hosting sites, I don't think more than a handful expect to get a reading audience of people who aren't already in their cell phones, or email address books. We start blogs for different reasons, and those who don't have them or read them would call bloggers, narcissists. And maybe that's true to a certain extent. But there was nothing in Lisa's blog that was meant to offend or hurt anyone in the community. In one post, she expressed disappointment because her conservative town decided not to bring "Brokeback Mountain" to the local big screen. "Too controversial," I think they said (I don't remember exactly, because before she changed the location of her entire blog, Lisa was forced to pull this entry off the website). In some ways, I wish that Lisa's blog would have fostered a kind of open-minded discourse instead of a defensiveness, or worse, that evil thing in which we've all partaken: gossip.

I feel for Lisa, and the only comparable experience I can imagine is if I'd taken up blogging during my four years in college, where the community amounted to the 2200 or so students at Williams. I could *never* have gotten away with it -- the relationship between the college and town was a tenuous one, and I wouldn't say it was always peachy amongst the student body itself -- and if I wanted to write, I would have had to edit myself a great deal. I'm not big on confrontation, you see.

Anyway, I don't think I've written anything terribly controversial on my blog -- with the exception, maybe, of my criticisms of Duane Reade and Nick Kristof -- and that's probably why I've not gotten the hundreds of thousands of unique hits and links that would make my blog push past the 1 million mark in Technorati's ranking system...

Well, what else "sells"? Sex, controversy, celebrities. Well, my blog doesn't have any of those. Although, Suri Cruise? What's with the use of all the letters in her surname also in her given name? ugh. Celebrity births make me feel weird inside.