Today's surprise is a quick one, as I am a bit overwhelmed with work. So I give you someone else's great list: 27 popular websites that became books (with varying degrees of success). Some examples:
9. Options: The Secret Life Of Steve Jobs (fakesteve.blogspot.com)
The Secret Diary Of Steve Jobs was the 21st-century Primary Colors for nerds. Silicon Valley ate up the blustery voice in the blog, even though it made no pretensions towards being the actual voice of the Apple cofounder. But if Jobs did keep a blog, does anyone doubt it would begin posts with statements like "My life is awesome. Let's face it. It's not like I'm bragging. I'm just true… I invented the friggin iPod, OK?" The reach of Fake Steve Jobs eventually extended to poetic tributes to Jerry Falwell, tongue-lashings of Facebook ("Their slogan isn't 'Don't be evil'—it's 'Don't get caught'") and predictions of a Web 2.0 downturn by an index of slutty Flickr pictures. But the blog will truly be remembered for continuing for nearly a year after its creator, Forbes tech editor (now Newsweek tech columnist) Dan Lyons—not an Apple insider, as had been suspected—was officially unmasked by The New York Times. For a blog important enough to be investigated by the Gray Lady, the book, no matter how original, was almost an afterthought. Sadly, Lyons, a novelist in his own right, ended the blog in August with the words, "Fake Steve is not really going away, he's just taking on a new form."
16. Passive Aggressive Notes: Painfully Polite And Hilariously Hostile Writings (passiveaggressivenotes.com)
Passive Aggressive Notes mines a niche of the found-humor vein first tapped by Found magazine (which didn't make this list because it started life as a 'zine, not a website). The site compiles user-submitted photographs of handwritten notes discovered in offices, apartment buildings, dorm rooms, and anywhere else the annoying foibles of humanity knock up against each other. The book version of the website doesn't go much further than including some never-before-seen examples of thinly veiled hostility, though it is loosely arranged by theme, which allows for some interesting insight into people's various confrontational styles: Witness a series of notes devoted to changing the toilet-paper roll, which range from a series of illustrated Post-Its demonstrating proper roll-changing technique to a single square clinging to an empty cardboard tube with the word "douche" scratched on it in big black Sharpie letters. From the banal ("For the love of God, please stop burning the popcorn!") to the absurd ("Opera singer: Close your windows or shut up."), Passive Aggressive Notes is a testament to the (often unintentional) hilarity that we're all capable of when pissed off and armed with anonymity.
Link: http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/why_buy_the_cow_27_popular/1
