Earlier this summer TIME Magazine posted its list of the Best Blogs of 2010. For the record, these blogs were already quite popular, without the help of TIME. For the sake of brevity I’m only going to include the ones that I personally have looked at more than three times (the full list is here), so let’s take a look at a few of these blogs and try to figure out why people love them so.
- Cake Wrecks
- Post Secret
- The Oatmeal
- Sh*t My Kids Ruined
- Deadline Hollywood
- The Daily Kitten
- Rogert Ebert’s Blog
- Pitchfork
- TechCrunch
- Gawker
Many of these blogs, like Cake Wrecks, Post Secret, The Oatmeal, Sh*t My Kids Ruined and The Daily Kitten have a pretty specific niche — there are a fair amount of blogs that showcase adorable animals, but they’re adorable animals, so all those blogs will probably be viewed like 80,000 times anyway — but more than that, they’re (for the most part) funny. People as a rule want to be entertained by the blogs they read. The Daily Kitten and Post Secret aren’t particularly funny, but again, adorable kittens, and as for PS, people as another rule like knowing weird things about other people as well as the idea of being able to anonymously bare their innermost secrets on the internet.
As for blogs like Deadline Hollywood, Pitchfork and Gawker, which are all one of many sites that deliver the same sort of news, they also are for the most part funny. Again, people want to be entertained, and all the better if they happen to be entertained and informed at the same time. TechCrunch isn’t really funny, but it gives easy-to-follow and relevant updates and stories about tech news that people would probably otherwise ignore.
Rogert Ebert’s in a whole other category. I personally haven’t been able to quite figure out the appeal, other than the fact that he’s a celebrated movie critic, but then again, my opinion of any Rogert E-bert online endeavor has been soured since I followed and unfollowed his Twitter (which he updates WAY too often).
