Obsessed With Barack Obama? Good News: He Now Has a Real Fan Site

Today I have received one of the funniest press releases I ever got with a person describing a new website he has just launched and clearly stating the reason for his new project: he has lost his job due to the economy and was looking for a way to stay afloat. Of course it is quite understandable that the vast majority of web products are launched with that very goal in mind with their founders hoping to eventually become millionaires and work from the comfort of their home – an hour or two a day.

But the difference is that usually people try to hide this particular financial reason behind the scene and offer a multitude of reasons about revolutionizing the way people do this or that online or helping make the world a better place for some group of people – or preferably for every living soul on Earth. Yet this guy was very blunt about his reasons and I think that this honesty deserves a mention as any honesty is way much better than the most creative and fascinating pretence.

But the best way about this guy (in addition to him being so honest) is that he thought about the prospects of his project from the very beginning – and quickly came up with the idea that is pretty simple yet looks to be very promising at the same time. He has noticed the immense popularity of the new President of the US among millions upon millions of people and decided to earn money off this popularity.

The new site launched today is called TrailObama and is based on a very simple idea – it will let you see every step the President makes in public. Same as Twitter invites you to answer one question “What are you doing?”, TrailObama invites you to find the answers to one simple question: What is President Obama doing?”. Basically the site works as an aggregator of all the content available online about Obama’s moves and actions but there is no sophisticated aggregation algorithm behind the site – all the content is selected manually by the team which includes both democrats and republicans and this approach is supposed to result in a comprehensive collection of unbiased and objective information.

In addition to offering news about the daily tasks and activities of Barack Obama, TrailObama also lets visitors to get involved by voting in weekly polls related to the president and discussing news with other visitors. There are also plans for stock charts demonstrating market reactions to Obama’s activities and even an Obama look-a-like contest.

The only problem with the new site introduced today is that I can hardly see how exactly the creator wants the site to help him stay afloat in the current economy as there are no ads on the site and no other visible things that could eventually generate some money. But chances are that his plan is to introduce ads at a later date not to irritate initial visitors with the obvious money-related purpose of the site.

But anyway the site looks clean and provides plenty of information on the topic many people are fascinated about so chances are it will be growing its popularity pretty quickly and will eventually generate money for its founder as well. I only hope that everything is very legal with using content from other publications as not every news outlet will be excited about having their content used elsewhere for someone else’s personal benefits.

But all in all I think that there’s nothing really different between the creator of TrailObama and any political journalist or blogger – everyone knows that you should try and write about what people actually want to read about. Of course it is better when you yourself care about what people want to read about but in reality no one cares if you do care or not – popular topic brings eyeballs and ad dollars so it is no wonder that we hunt for new ideas on how to bring people like Barack Obama on technical blogs even if they don’t really fit that easily. So there’s nothing wrong about TrailObama trying to capitalize on the national and international fascination over Barack Obama and I do believe the new site will soon see enough followers to actually help its creator stay afloat after losing his job.