Daily Archives: December 14, 2005

Why do people believe The Da Vinci Code is real?

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Over at Jesus the Radical Pastor, John Frye asks “Why do people believe the Da Vinci code?” My take on it is that Dan Brown has followed the same formula that so successfully propogates so many urban legends. That is

  1. Start with an outrageous premise, but keep it just this side of impossible
  2. Make sure it involves a conspiracy of some sort, meaning that people would be trying to keep it a secret
  3. Provide lots of “facts,” which readers could check if they wanted to, knowing full well that they in fact won’t be checked

Once you combine all that with a fairly well-written book, and you’ve got all the makings of a cult following.

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A minor blogwatcher change

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People who use Blogwatcher regularly probably won’t notice this, but I’ve made a slight change to it. The reason you won’t notice is because you’ll only see it if you try to view your bloglist when you’re not logged in. It was showing a “sampling” of the logs I support. The problem was that the ads that were getting selected had nothing to do with people’s actual subscriptions.
So I’ve modified it. Now, if an unregistered user tries to read their bloglist, they’ll see a combination of everyone’s subscription list who has logged in within the last 2 weeks.
If anybody has a problem with this, let me know. I could probably add an option to the accounts setting page that would let you “opt out” of having your subscriptions listed. Note: there’s nothing that shows who has subscribed – only that somebody has subscribed.

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