If you’ve been on the internet in the last couple years, you may have stumbled up FMyLife, or My Life is Average, or Damn You Autocorrect, or any number of sites in this genre.

The genre is sites that let you post little bits of content around a certain theme, and they are usually similarly formatted. People can like comments, or dislike them with different clever words. Some let you upload photos. But all of these sites do basically this.

Now, these types of sites have become so popular, that you just see really random ones popping up on the internet. But let’s say you don’t know how to make one of these sites, but have a really silly idea for a community that would like to post short joke stories. That’s what Popular Site Template is for.

Here is a screen shot from a site made with Popular Site Template called My Life is Indie.

This is the most recent site I made with Google App Engine. For those interested in seeing how it works, code is available at github.

As I sat down to write a new article for the Flipside, I went to do my so-called “research.”

Today, I decided, the perfect topic to write about was this so-called “Balloon Boy.” When balloon boy came up in our meeting and we brainstormed ideas about it, I realized this was just an unbelievable topic to satirize. Mainly–when things that happen in the real world seem fake, you know the opportunity is ripe for irony and satire.

Let me explain a little more.

I went to go read more about what happened with this balloon boy so I could come up with some sort of coherent viewpoint and a set of ideas and a perspective for my writing. I searched Google for balloon boy and started to read some articles, and while doing so, realized how this event is extremely meta.

My one sentence take: The balloon boy incident is really about how a hoax fooled the media, and then fooled the rest of us, and in doing so, succeeded in its publicity stunt.

So why was reading the news on this meta? Well, the news is exactly what caused and blew up the problem in the first place. I was reading these reports which were the source of all the fuss initially.

So where to look for credible information? I think the answer to this very important question is not where to look, but how to look. We look when someone points, that is kind of a given of human behavior. But I think the thing we can control and the thing we should work on is to look carefully. Look slowly and think over the timing, the source, and the motivation of the information.

At the end of this, I am still unsure what to make fun of about balloon boy, but it is a very interesting topic to think about how the media can lead us astray. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no… it’s Balloon boy!

See my research paper on critical reading here
See an article with similar ideas from the wall street journal here