Finding one’s niche in the blogosphere

How a cheesy remark can engender a cottage industry

Conversations about cheese often don’t reach the tenor of the famed exchange betwixt Messrs. Mousebender (John Cleese) and Wensleydale (Michael Palin) in the famed Monty Python sketch.

Ours, sadly, was no exception. However, ours did bear more fruit than that other exchange brought forth cheese.

Colleague Bill Sweetland and I stood near a spread of fermented curd and other goodies—assembled in celebration of the day the world was blessed—and he said that though he had been a “bad vegetarian” for decades, it was not until a few years ago that he gave up all animal-produced foodstuffs, owing to health concerns.

“I am probably,” the sonorous Sweetland intoned, “the world’s only unintentional vegan.”

Bill is a wellspring of such things.

The mind raced … A blog? A blog! The Unintentional Vegan. A niche blog—and aren’t they all?—for an audience of, perhaps, a dozen. Maybe, in a cruel irony, a baker’s dozen.

That gave rise to musings about other possible mini-blogs and micro-sites, too arcane even for Twitter feeds:

The Inadvertant Environmentalist — Cutting down on one’s carbon footprint through “green” mishaps.