Angel Laws, 22, a college student in Jacksonville, N.C., merely wanted to poke fun at a celebrity.
For the entry titled "Guess Who: Messed Up Feet Edition" on her gossip blog, Concrete Loop, Laws posted a photo of a pair of weathered bronze feet wrapped in strappy black sandals and hinted at the person's identity by commenting, "I guess all those years on the runway take a toll on the feet."
Unfortunately for Laws, the owner of those feet, the model Iman, happens to read Concrete Loop.
Iman responded to the item on her MySpace page by uploading an image of herself and her husband, rocker David Bowie, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute gala. For the event this year, Iman wore a white pantsuit with white shoes. In the caption, Iman wrote, "Decided to cover my feet up as Concreteloop would post how ugly my feet are."
Welcome to the raucous world of black-celebrity blogs. Sites such as Media Take Out (media takeout.com), Concrete Loop (concreteloop.com), and Young, Black and Fabulous (ybf.blog spot.com) are among the 10 most searched gossip blogs among Yahoo users, according to the Yahoo Buzz Index.
They're joined by Crunk & Disorderly (crunktastical.blog spot.com), Bossip (bossip.com), Cake and Ice Cream (cakeandice-cream.blogspot.com), and others, most of which have arrived in the past two years.
The sites were created by gossip fans frustrated by the fact that their favorite mainstream gossip blogs -- and magazines -- seemed to limit their coverage to superstars such as Beyonce, Halle Berry or Will Smith and paid little attention to celebrities such as Sanaa Lathan, Chris Brown or Tracee Ellis Ross.
"I decided to do it myself because they were ignoring black people," says Natasha Eubanks, 25, of Washington, who started Young, Black and Fabulous in 2005, weeks before entering Loyola University law school in New Orleans.
She launched YB&F a few weeks before Hurricane Katrina hit and became more serious with it, by posting daily and creating her own YB&F vocabulary, as her disenchantment with law school grew. It's now 10th on the Yahoo Buzz's gossip blog chart -- and it's Eubanks' full-time job.
"What people don't realize is Girlfriends is the most popular show for African-Americans," says Fred Mwangaguhunga, 32, of the CW sitcom about four female friends that stars Ross.
A former corporate lawyer, Mwangaguhunga began Media Take Out last year, and it now is second only to Perez Hilton's gossip site, according to Yahoo Buzz.
