My five minutes of fame

I don't know if anyone of you have noticed but lately there's been a glitch in the "Next Blog" functionality of Blogger. For some reason a small handful of lucky blogs are referred to by that function disproprortionately to the rest of the millions of other Blogger blogs.

One of them is a blog called BrandNew which according to its owner now benefits from referrals from this glitch to the tune of 5,000 hits per day. What did the owner of BrandNew, the venerable ad man Mr Tobias Wacker decide to do with his lottery winnings? He got creative and launched his first "stunt" which he called "Your Five Minutes of Fame". The details of the "experiment" can be found in the blog post there of the same title (click on that last link), but this excerpt I quote sums it up:

You write some short description of yourself, your [non-profit] organization, your project or your thoughts. Then you comment your content to this post. If it is good stuff I will make an own blog post out of it, and link to the sites you mentioned. Or in other words, I give away this blog to your cause for a post, if you convince me. If you want me to add a picture to your post, add a link to the picture in the end of your comment, so that I can grab it.

I'm not really a patron of the lottery. So with BrandNew getting 5,000 hits a day and presumably hundreds of other bloggers trying their luck at getting their five minutes there, the attitude I harboured as I considered spending two minutes banging out a short pitch for this nothing-to-lose opportunity almost did me in. But then I pulled myself together and came up with this:

Sorry, I didn't realise this is where I should make my pitch [I originally placed it in one of the selected blogs' entries]. Here goes:

I've earned my blogging stripes as a social/political commentator over the last 10 years and have decided to do something different. So I started a new blog:

http://suddenlyfourty.blogspot.com/

I plan to apply the same kind of vulcan logic I applied to socio-political commentary to, well, a more diverse range of more personal and interesting things. [a smiley follows]

Well as it turns out that was two minutes well-spent because I got my five minutes! Not bad. I'm actually quite pleased with myself. I don't know if this will actually convert to sustained traffic (though that of course depends on other factors) but to actually get into a shortlist of eight selected from three hundred entries received "just in the last 24 [hours]" (as of Mr Wacker's update today) constitutes a beating-of-the-odds in my book (not to downplay Mr Wacker's, ehem, good taste of course).

Anyways, there you go. My small win for the day. I'll hang on to this for the next day or two (or seven). I don't really win too many (if any) contests so I count this as a significant personal win in the real sense of being selected for the prize rather than simply having the luck of the draw. Thanks Mr Wacker. I almost feel like Suddenly Fourty is today's Blog of Note!