Seth’s blog

Mohamed Ibrahim, the New York schoolteacher who does Behind The Approval Matrix (which I have blogged about) also has a blog called I Got UGGs!. I asked him how the Ugg blog began. Here’s what he said:

I have a fetish about Uggs. Whenever I see a girl wearing Uggs, it’s the sexiest thing in the world to me. It drives me crazy. You know how they say “do what you love and the money will come later”? I read an article in Time about bloggers and blogging. One of the blogs they profiled was by two ladies who post pictures of kittens and cats and write little blurbs about them. This gave me an idea: I’ll do the same thing about girls in Ugg boots. They got $5-6000/month from ads and all they do is post pics and write blurbs about them. I’ll take pics of girls wearing Uggs. Not only will I enjoy it but maybe I can also make some money. I went to Best Buy, got the cheapest digital camera, and hit the streets. The first place I went was Times Square. Initially I would approach people and ask them if I could take their pic for the blog. I discovered later it’s better to just take the pic and put it up. That’s what I do now. Now I get people sending me pics — they take a picture of their friends or they send me pics of celebrities. We’re getting over 500 page views/day. It’s only been about 4 months.

The Gawker link Mohamed got by telling them some crazy guy was taking Ugg pics and blogging about it.

In this case, Weiss says what he really thinks by repeating what someone told him:

She can never bring these ideas up with her Jewish relations, they go haywire. She never talks about these ideas in company.

But Weiss can express them without breaking a sweat. This is amazing.

Tyler Cowen on blogs as truth.

“I can say what I really think,” said Tyler about blogging a few days ago. Not only that, (a) this truth-speaking is on a topic he cares about, (b) what he says is based on considerable knowledge (what an ignorant person “really thinks” about something isn’t helpful), and (c) a lot of people listen. This is a potent mix.

The magic of blogging is that when you start you can tell the truth because no one is listening. With zero audience, it makes sense — it feels good — to tell the truth. If you are an expert like Tyler, this sort of thing is irresistible to readers (economics confidential) so your audience grows. Now it is too late to start censoring yourself; people are reading your blog because you tell the truth.

Tyler’s blog.

I asked Bryan Caplan what effect his blogging had had. It made his first book a success, he said. Or helped make it a success. He had started blogging about two years before it appeared. Other bloggers wrote about his book as if they knew him. They knew him from his blog.

A recent EW Popwatch post compared several YouTube versions of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, much like I did here. It’s like Leno and Letterman telling the same joke. We have an Instinct of Connoisseurship, Veblen would say.