The Internet: Serious business.
It's given way to all sorts of weird shit: Citizen journalism, three wolf moon shirts, keyboard playing cats, Perez Hilton. But since it also enables users to hide behind their computer monitors in anonymity, a whole new wave of blogs has started up–ones to make fun of other people.
Not that we're objecting or anything.
With sites like PeopleofWalmart.com, LATFH.com (which stands for Look At This Fucking Hipster, of course), more and more blogs are popping up with reader submitted photos and commentary.
The latest is called People of the Park, where the website's moderators–South Orange County residents A.B. Roth, N. VanDerMere and Raquel all in their 20s–post reader-submitted and personal snapshots of interesting Disneyland resort patrons. Whether it's a grown man in a pink and lavender button-up with Disney princesses (and sparkles!), a mom with her cheeks hanging out of her cutoffs or a man enjoying his lunch in a restroom stall, it's all fair game. It's all relatively innocuous, especially when in comparison with the previously discussed Flickr album titled “Fat People At Disneyland, which was more cruel than entertaining. Oddball outfits and the “fashionably challenged” are more the focus here than uh, “fat people.”
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The site launched February 3, 2010 and has already achieved over
570,000 page views.
The three say they simply enjoy people
watching at the park on some days: “After a certain point, it started
to become a battle of who could spot the guest that was the most over
the top” Roth tells me. “It was kind of on a whim that we decided we
should start a blog about it.”
Roth admits the group was
indeed inspired by PeopleOfWalmart.com,
but that they didn't set out to be a carbon copy, either.
“You
see, the guests that grace the pages of our blog are not making a quick
run to a grocery store. They're visiting a place where they know the'll
be seen by thousands of other people,” explains Roth. “We are
flabbergasted at the amount of people who overlook that and think, 'Meh,
this will do,'–or even better, 'I look great!'”
And I know you're wondering: Roth, VanDerMere
and Raquel are all indeed Annual Passport holders and yes, even fans of
Disneyland. Roth tells me they actually don't receive as much hatemail
as they expected–“It's down to a couple per week.” Though the site has
been the topic of discussion on several online forums, where it is
expectantly met with much disapproval, it's also been the subject of
praise on Twitter and humor sites like CollegeHumor.com.
But
the three want to clarify their harmless intentions with PeopleOfthePark.com, stating that
the patrons photographed were snapped in a very public place with
thousands of people. The site, they say, is for entertainment purposes
only. As stated in the site's FAQ, anyone who finds themselves the
subject of a photo and would like it removed, they can simply contact
the site and it will be removed.
Roth, Raquel and VanDerMere would also like to express their gratitude to the site's visitors: “We'd just like to give a huge thank you to our fans, our followers on Twitter and Facebook, and anyone who has submitted a photo. Keep 'em coming! Your support has been phenomenal!”
So what's next? The sign of
success for any website: A potential iPhone app, naturally. On the next page: A few more favorites from People Of the Park.
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