Coming Clean: The Best and Worst of DailyConfession.com
Posted by Blogmaster in Books, tags: Best, Clean, Coming, DailyConfession.com, Worst
From Publishers Weekly
Since 2000, DailyConfession.com has served as a haven “where people could unburden their souls and receive honest and humane responses.” When Fox first launched the site, there were only a handful of visitors each day, but by December 2003, he had 8.5 million visitors a week. At the site, people confess to whatever they like, and other visitors respond. While Fox edits out “obscene, racist, or sexist rants” as well as “vicious” attacks on confessors, and promises to vet criminal material with the proper authorities, everything else stays, if Fox decides it’s sincere. While such inclusivity may work online, pagefuls of repetitious responses can be tedious in a book. Predictably, sexual infidelity is a big theme, but there’s also an extraordinary number of people reporting on pee, poop and fart obsessions. Most responses are variations on “you go girl,” “you’re pathetic,” “euuuuw” or netspeak’s “lol,” except for the routinely sensible remarks by “Gramps” (who may be Fox’s alter ego). Apart from its meandering, unfocused arrangement, the book suffers from competition—with itself. Why spend $12.95 on the book when the same material is available free, online? There, readers can also respond to what others are writing or confess to something and have people “lol” or “lmao” or even “roflma.” Btw, a helpful glossary of netspeak is included. B&w illus.
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Product Description
Launched in May 2000, DailyConfession.com was created as an outlet where people could confess their sins and unburden their souls in complete anonymity, as well as receive honest, compassionate responses from fellow Web users. As the Web site’s popularity grew, visiting the site soon became a daily obsession for millions. To date, DailyConfession.com has logged over 250,000 confessions and two million responses, and regularly receives over one million hits each day.Coming Clean comes directly from the Internet pages of DailyConfession.com. In this truly unique collection, author and webmaster Greg Fox has compiled the wildest and wackiest confessions and responses posted to the site. The confessions are organized into categories (loosely) based on the Ten Commandments, such as That Old Time Religion; Urges, Obsessions, and Fantasies; Stop, Thief!; Family Matters; and Liar, Liar! The confessions and responses included range from the serious and truly poignant-tales of true love, suicide, and spiritual waning-to the hilariously kooky-weird habits, alien abductions, and naked neighbors. Intensely entertaining, this book doesn’t merely offer gratuitous voyeurism; it illuminates some intriguing-and surprisingly common-aspects of human nature. Those who dip into Coming Clean are bound to recognize themselves in the pages of this fascinating book.
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Entries (RSS)
This book is funny, and worth it for the price, but as a loyal reader of DailyConfession for 4 years, there have been better confessions on the site than the ones listed here. I hate to crack on the beloved Webbie, but some of the decisions for included confessions could have been better.
As a daily visitor (addict!) of Dailyconfession.com, I was very excited to see this book in print. It is an extrordinarily fun book, including some of the weirdest and wackiest confessions in the three years I’ve been visiting the website. Just when you thought you’d heard everything, the next page is an even crazier real-life story. While not for younger audiences (nothing sexually explicit, just the chapter on adultery may not be appropriate for youngsters), it’s a book that will make you both laugh out loud, and question the intelligence of the human race.
I love this stuff! What I really like about this book (and the website), is that I can read about the problems other people are having – problems much bigger than my own, and then I don’t feel so bad about my little issues. I actually could not put the book down until I had read it cover to cover. There are many strange people out there, and although I consider myself a well informed individual, I confess that I learned quite a few things from this book. It is great reading – especially at work on break. I just start laughing at a confession and everyone around asks me to read the confession out loud. One note: Don’t lend this book out until you finish reading it, It gets passed around… Good times!