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I started Fun With Headlines a few years back, and with no advertising on my part I was suprised how quickly Google picked me up. Right now I'm about the 5th or 6th result when you search for "fun headlines" and (obviously) the 1st when you search for "fun with headlines." At times I have been the 1st for "fun headlines," and at other times I have been around 10th.

OK, so there aren't that many sites like mine, let alone sites that update daily over a period of years and include their entire archive on the site that grows daily. On the other hand, to my knowledge from doing searches on Google, I have very few site that link to mine, and I thought that counted highly with Google. So basically without trying to game the system, let alone advertise my site (other than incidentally in comments like this), I've been treated really well by Google.

In my case, it must be the longevity issue coupled with the scarcity of sites like mine. It sure ain't the links to my site.

Please, this is such old news that it's already in my archives.

Oh, OK, it's archives from yesterday, but I'll bet I'm the only person who put a California surfer accent to the story...

Ugh, now you've put that song in my head! If there's one thing people who read my site have come to expect from me is I'll use a bad song to make a bad joke any chance I get.

OK, lemme see, Eye of the Tiger as a commentary on the SCO case....

Hey, I deliberately picked Fun With Headlines .net instead of .com (though I got that too to avoid confusion, and auto-route back to .net), because I wanted to do what was right. I am not a company, just an individual. I am not making money off my jokes, so I am clearly not a .com in my book. I am a web site, and nothing more, so it made sense for me to be a .net even though I knew some people would get confused and assume .com.

So why are they going to pick on us first? What's that about?

"Fun With Prime Numbers"?! Hey! That infringes upon Fun With Headlines my intellectual property! I'll sue!

Naaaah. I'll let them get away with it by leaving this blatant advertising instead.

(Hint to the clue-challenged: I'm joking. I am not in favor of IP as a concept, which is why I give my feeble jokes away for free, which is about twice what they're worth)

Thanks. I figured I was going to get flamed into a crispy cinder for my comment here. Glad to see people noticing I was calling for balance, not either extreme.

"Thank goodness someone can resist the kneejerk libertarian cry against Government involvement. "

Heh. I don't know why, but that struck my mind funny. Almost like a new sig line:

Fun With Headlines: Resisting kneejerk cries since 2002!

Ads are not inherently evil creations of hellish spawn (although it certainly seems that way at times). I can remember back when I was reading print mags for tech subjects, and being very interested in the ads. They were targeted at a subject I was interested in, and some of the products were products I was thinking of buying. Those ads helped me. I enjoyed seeing them.

Some TV ads are so funny, you look forward to watching them (until you get sick of them.....WISE.....ER......BUD).

I accept the usefulness and necessity of ads for providing "free" access to some information that would not otherwise be free of direct cost (or even possible) otherwise. This may sound surprising to anyone who has read the About page on my web site, where I diss advertising executives. But that's different. I run a hobby site, just for fun, designed to make people laugh and then go about their lives. I pay for this myself and I don't believe advertising belongs on such Web sites, sites the Web was created for (person-to-person communication, not selling wares). But I don't hate advertising as a whole. I just want to see it kept in its proper place.

And if you can make the ads relevant, interesting, useful, and even fun, it helps a LOT.

Lots of comments slamming 'blog' around here: "It's a diary!", "It's a journal!", "Why make a new word for an old idea?"

Well, because it is a new idea. Diaries were kept for private viewing, a few notable exceptions notwithstanding. The idea of being able to post your "diary" globally is certainly empowering. Yeah, yeah, we're /. and we look down on anyone who cannot do HTML. Fine, be elitist, but most of the world is not, and never will be, programmers, or even scripters. And blogging software has given the rest of the world a simple tool that enables them to do what we have been able to do for years.

Blogs are more than the sum of their parts, furthermore. It's not just that these "diaries" are online. The blog phenomenom is based on the mutual linking that goes on. It's a community -- that hardly describes a diary or a journal -- of users connecting to each other. Does that sound familiar? Sure, it's the promise of the web, only now accessible to a lot more people.

Finally blogs are not just "diaries." For example, I have my web site where I have fun with the wording of headlines. In order to see how the power of blogging works, I recently created a blog of my site in order to see if the connectivity of the blog community would increase awareness. I'm playing with the blog phenemenon, in other words. Yet there is nothing about me at my blog, no diary entries, nothing. It's all about the humor.

Blogging is about the community, not just a diary.