We did an unexpected thing last Saturday morning -- we surfed the Internet. And before you can say, "Isn't that what you do every morning Pinky?," we'll tell you that while our job has us running the content gamut from stripper clowns to breaking news about which former S.F. Senator isn't running for city supervisor, it's usually off our own url. While SF Weekly.com is that awesome, it's always good to spice things up.
Many people blame the Internet for many things: the death of newspapers and quality content is one. The continuing proliferation of pot, porn, cat, and bacon memes is another. Meme haters take note: We can honestly say, especially after we've sat gloriously stuffing ourselves with one mesmerizing Techcrunch, Metafilter, and Gawker post after another, that smart people like "Keyboard Cat" too (to say nothing of Cats For Gold).
There's a fuzzy feeling one gets when you're looking at a choice piece of Internet content, and no it's not "dying a little inside." Sometimes, when you click on something like this, or this or especially this, that you know you will never un-see, it's worth the two seconds you spent clicking.
Perhaps this can explain the success of our friends over at The Chive, who are celebrating their one year anniversary today. Launched in November 2008 by Leo and John Resig, the site has ballooned from a pithy 190,000 monthly visitors to over 5,000,000 visitors (25,000,000 monthly views) in a year -- Basically, you wish you had their page views.
Modeled after Russian photo blog sites like Widelec and EILF House, The Chive was the first take-off on the concept in the U.S. "We've become the hub for 'Photobombs,' 'Douchebags,' and 'Hot Mail Order Brides,' whatever that means," founder John Resig explained.
Even when that top spot is on someone else's website (hint hint). Happy birthday guys, to many more ...
You can follow The Chive on Twitter at @thechive and us on Twitter at @sfweekly.
