Post Your Failure

The prodigal son might have been a frequent visitor to failblog.org.

It used to be that when we did something stupid such as, say, walk into an apparently invisible plate-glass door or fall down the stairs or back the car out of the garage while the door was still down, we’d try to keep that to ourselves. No sense letting the neighbors know we’re dopes, after all.

But with the advent of the Internet and the popularity of shows such as Video Zonkers or the older America’s Funniest Home Videos (which probably started the trend), people are now beginning to look at their gaffes, faux pas and misadventures as things to share with the whole world. We’ve bought into Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” idea, even if that fame comes from a 15-second clip on a video-sharing site and shows us just before we headed to the emergency room.

But while most video-posting sites, such as YouTube, carry a wide variety of content, one site is devoted entirely to the imperfect populace. It’s called the “Fail Blog.” Think of it as a cross between AFV, Jay Leno’s “Headlines”...