I saw the movie Julie and Julia, a melange of Julia Child's experience in getting her famous cookbook published and Julie Powell, a blogger from New York City who cooked her way through Julia Child's cookbook and blogged about it.
The movie is endearing and enjoyable, but, speaking from a blogger's perspective, can I just say, wait a minute? This Julie Powell committed herself to cooking the recipes in Julia Child's cookbook over the course of a year and blogged about how it was going? And she got famous doing that? How could anyone possibly be interested?
I must really be doing something wrong in my blog. I suppose I could have visited every historic site, park, and museum in the Washington, DC area and blogged about each of them. Or I could have requested a 15-minute interview with every member of Congress and blogged about that for 535 days. But why would anyone care? I mean, really, if you thought you were going to get famous by blogging your way through someone else's cookbook, I would have told you that the odds were about one in several million.
Well, she started early: her first entry is August 25, 2002. I don't think there were so many blogs back then. Now there are millions. And she persisted. And she had a good focus, instead of just looking at "the News, the World, and Life," the way I do. And it worked! Her blog was made into a book and then a movie, while I'm still waiting.
But my first taste of fame starts tomorrow! Faithful readers, next month's posts will appear here and on Concurring Opinions, a group blog hosted by my colleague Dan Solove. They've got thousands of readers, so I'll have a wider audience. Look out, competing bloggers.
2 comments:
People like stories. Narratives. Incidentally, "one in several million" seems reasonable, applying the birthday paradox; 50/50 shot of someone getting famous with only 1200 or so bloggers (at 1 in a 1000000).
Actually, it's not a birthday paradox. More like 1 in 700000 to hit 50/50.
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