Sell! Sell!

Blogshares.org ranks blogs by links. I reviewed three of the site's top 5 ranked "humor" blogs in English, though the "industries" in which blogs are placed are not always a fitting category for a particular blog.

"Go Fug Yourself," for example, is really more of a fashion critique blog. Using the word "fug," an abbreviated form of the slang word "fugly" (fucking ugly), the bloggers posts pics of popular celebrities and red carpet walkers in attractive, questionable, or hideous getups. Some of the posts have just a comment or two about the clothes, a few have a little more talk to them, but mostly it's about the photographs themselves. The tone is almost always "what was she thinking?!" and often there's a link to something the comment references while bashing the star. The intended audience of these posts appears to be those who want to keep up on fashion and gossip but have not enough time (or perhaps a bit too much). Text is always separate from the images, and any person even a little familiar with the blog wouldn't need to see anything but the photo to get a general sense of the writer's opinion. When a dress is questionable, on the border between bold and bomb, there is usually a poll for people to vote whether they thought it worked or not. Commenting seems to have been disabled, but the writers have published a book. From its back cover: "Their smart, scathing dressing-down of fashion disasters has become a media sensation, with Time dubbing their website one of the fifty coolest blogs and Entertainment Weekly tagging it as one of the staff's twenty-five favorite sites on the Internet."

"I Can Has Cheezburger?" is perhaps more of a teen/college cult phenomenon. Commonly known as "Lolcats," the blog posts pictures of cats with captions--ostensibly from the cats themselves. The misspellings and grammar mistakes of the captions give almost an authenticity to the captions, but mostly it makes everything so darn cute. The cats are almost always in a funny or awkward position, photographed up close or from an odd angle, and often engaged with some object or other animal. The caption makes the viewer see the picture in a humorous light, and voila--it's all funnier than it should be. Viewers vote and comment, but the pictures usually stand alone or thank the source, and it is clear that viewers are encouraged to send in their own pictures--or even recaption the ones already up. There are several companion websites with similar themes--one is for dogs, another for celebs--but the cats were first and remain the most popular. It seems like the intent of the blog is to be cute, make people laugh, and get pageviews like nobody's business. And they've accomplished these three things extremely well.

"The Silverbacks" makes humor its bread and political commentary its butter. There are funny pictures of animals, amusing videos, syndicated comics reposted, and the occasional text joke. Frequently, though, the site pushes a Republican point of view, trying to make jokes at Obama's expense and even posting anti-Obama materials that don't try to be funny. The blogger also endorses drinking, gun ownership, and Christianity with permanent pictures down the left side of the page. While much of the content is indeed funny, there is also significant nudity and off-color humor. The blog warns you of that, however, and makes no attempt to hide its political affiliation. A few posts get a few comments, typically just "that's so funny!" or the like, and the audience is almost certainly southern males of at least past their mid-teens. The blog is very eclectic, but not especially unique--in fact, it mostly reposts content from elsewhere, in contrast to both of the previous blogs.

All three manage to be funny, but there is no clear reason why they seem to be cut above the rest.