NBC 10’s Hot New Web Feature

Oh, but the front-page fun isn’t done yet! Here’s a story that popped up on the front of WCAU’s website (now called nbcphiladelphia.com, if you’re keeping track of these things):

Yes! Apparently, somebody who works for the website decided to write a whole article about a kind of tongue-in-cheek blog about why there are so many women wearing headsets in stock photos on company websites. “While they can be a comforting face in a confusing online world, they are just as often a default design component,” the site’s about page reads. “This website celebrates the former and challenges the latter.”

So what’s up with this? Is it some Pherotones-style marketing gimmick? An actual fetish? What say you, local NBC affiliate:

They say there’s a fetish for everything, so we suppose we shouldn’t be terribly surprised to find out some people really, really get into those stock photographs of women wearing telephone headsets.

It’s not really a fetish — it’s more of a “throwaway gimmick blog” — but I’ll let this one slide even though it didn’t really answer any of my questions about the site. The story’s only two paragraphs, but the title intrigues me: It seems to imply this is a new feature, Random Fetish, that will be gracing the website of NBC 10 each and every day (kind of like Abridged Daily News Columnists!).

I, for one, am wholly behind this new feature. I can’t wait ’til someone’s Tumblr account exposes the fetish for other corporate website design elements besides headset-wearing women.