Paul: The whole site grew out of a sizism presentation I gave in college, of all places. We were to discuss discrimination in whatever form we chose, and I chose sizism. Afterwards I wanted to line up my resources in one place, and I chose to do it on my website. A subsection called the Fat Acceptance Resource was born.

But like any website, it longed for new content. When blogs were relatively new, I thought the format would be a natural for my stuff - and would give me the chance to talk about new issues. Big Fat Blog was launched and started taking off.

August 18, 2000 was the very first entry I've got in the BFB database. The Internet Archive (web.archive.org) doesn't quite reach back this far, but August has always been BFB's anniversary month. So we're coming up on five years, and that's in addition to the Fat Acceptance Resource, which had a two-and-a-half year run.

WOM: What are some recurring themes/issues that you and the readership discuss on BFB?

Paul: Obviously the biggest themes are discrimination and media portrayal of fat people. Since BFB's community is primarily women, overall themes do lean in that direction too. But one thing I find very interesting and beneficial is that, more than anything, people want a safe place to share their stories - their journeys to acceptance. Sometimes that fits in with whatever we're discussing on BFB.

WOM: How has BFB's readership changed over time? Have you noticed any change in who's being reached (demographically) by BFB?

Paul: Numbers-wise, BFB went straight up until about the end of 2004... since then, we've been holding steady at about 3,000 people per day. I think that's pretty cool, frankly, that so many people are reading. Our registered member base has been hovering around 1,000 people for a few months. In that, though, I've seen an overall shift to a young, female demographic.

Honestly I think a lot of it is due to the success of LiveJournal (LJ), which is a free blogging service. Early last year I noticed a lot of links to BFB from LJ discussions and journals. It was great to see, and a majority of LJ users linking us at that time were young women. In addition to LJ, NAAFA chose to publish our feed on the very front page of their site. It's a free web, and they went ahead and did it without my knowing at first, but in the end I think it's a win-win.

WOM: What are some of your goals for BFB? What kind of timeline do you have for those goals?

Paul: My overall goal with BFB is to get people interested in social change for fat people. I know that's a huge, tall order and it's a lot for one website to do. But there are a few tools I've been working on - and when I say tools, I mean web goodies - that will help people get together and organize local think tanks. The goal of these isn't to compete with organizations like ISAA or NAAFA, but to really parlay into them - to get people discussing these important issues, and then take it to the next level.

On a pure site basis, I really want people to continue to feel comfortable at BFB. We have an extremely intelligent readership, hungry for information and community. I've been working on a massive site redesign that will, in time, put more of a focus on the people on the site while keeping the blog content fresh. Everything should be in place before the end of the year, with my real goal to have things updated in Spring.