I saw a book group reading Life of Pi at Brueggers the other day. I also saw a bad reality television show about raiding the room of someone you are considering dating. The combo inspired me to consider the concept of a Blog Raid. It probably already exists but I'm too lazy to look around for it. But basically it is a group of marauding blog readers who choose each week or month to focus on a specific person's blog for the raid. During that month the club reads the blog throughly and comments on items either through trackbacks or directly in the comments field as well. The group would also meet like a book club to discuss the blogger's life and published work for what each reader got out of the experience and their thoughts. The final outcome could also be a banner that the blogger could proudly place on their site to let the world know that they had survived a blog raid. I would hope that people would be civil in their comments knowing that the author was going to read them and that the type of sites that would be chosen would be full of content but off the beaten path such that it wouldn't be likely that on any given week or month for them to suddently find hundreds of comments from strangers on their site. The reality of the people who write online in their own little universes is that if such a group of maurauding critics did exist, the average blogger would sign-up on an online form hoping to be one of the lucky few, much like reality television stars, chosen to be publicly scrutinized. The list for the raiders of the lost blog group to review would probably always be far longer than the number of sites the group could actually review. Maybe if I get some spare time I can organize a blog raid to see if I can get it to catch-on and then I could abandon it saying that it was yesterday's fad and make fun of the raiders.

Additional note: I did find something similar in half-bakery called a Virtual Flash Mob and it included an on target quote from Worldgineer that summarized what it would be like to be raided:

"Pictures of my family, 0 comments
Today I took a walk in the park, 0 comments
Thoughts about donuts, 1872 comments
What was all of that about?, 0 comments
Hello, is anybody there?, 0 comments
More thoughts about donuts, 0 comments
Pictures of my dog, 0 comments

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Worldgineer, Aug 15 2005 "