There isn’t an exact science to predicting what sites and ideas will resonate with the online audience. One thing that has proven to be true is that blogs dedicated to subjects that are universally appealing – fashion, food, travel, pets – have a greater chance of making it than blogs focused on a more niche or targeted audience. Along those lines, it seems that awkwardness plays a major role in people’s lives.

It’s a word that has perhaps lost its meaning and intent as teenagers and young adults today use it so freely. In different contexts, “awkward” can mean everything from weird to stiff. “Awkward” has petty much become a replacement for the word “uncomfortable,” single-handedly conveying all of the speechlessness, disturbance, annoyance, uneasiness, and embarrassment that young people endure each day. So it comes as no surprise that this mutually understood (and now welcomed) awkwardness has found its way onto web pages as a resource to connect people. Rather than emphasize the gripes of dealing with unanticipated situations, these contributors and readers highlight the entertainment value to their uncomfortable social circumstances.

Here, the seven best sites that embrace the world’s awkwardness:

7. Awkward Band Photos: Posing for a picture with your musical group – whether for an album cover, poster, or other feature – can prove more difficult than you’d expect when you factor in that musicians have their own senses of style and looks.

6. Awkward Facebook: People share a good deal of their personal information and thoughts on Facebook, but sometimes you have to wonder if they thought their comments through before posting.

5. Awkward Workplace Photos: Some jobs put you in more precarious positions than others. The site lets you vote on the level of awkwardness that the people in these images share as a result of their professional pursuits.

4. Awkward Boners: The title says it all. The site allows you to vote on the level of awkwardness of each of these men’s uncontrollables, making these moments less creepy and more comical.

3. Awkward in 140: Twitter’s character limit produces difficulty for some Twitterers who wind up sending messages like “Lovely. The toilets are really loud at church and they’re praying” and consistently provide just a little too much information.

2. Awkward Stock Photos: Stock images are popular on the Internet, but they can also look clumsy next to more serious stories. This site collects the best pictures that make you wonder “Why would this picture possibly need to exist?”

1. Awkward Family Photos: This Internet favorite and soon-to-be coffee table book  brings together all the photos that families once buried in the back of the album in order to demonstrate that every family has the same photographic issues and shame.

Photos via Awkward Stock Photos, Awkward Workplace Photos and Awkward Band Photos. You can get your own damn Awkward Boners photos.

The Huffington Post, which currently profits off of the blood, sweat, and tears of its many hapless unpaid contributors (j/k), has hit upon a new way to involve its readers in the creative process: crowdsourcing headlines through Twitter.

According to NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen — who tweeted about it before The Huffington Post itself — the idea is based on notions discussed in this blog post by Josh Young of Networked News, who mentioned the even further-reaching idea of an entirely Twitter-aggregated ‘publication’ which he called “The Hourly Press.” (bold=correction)

Update: Oops; Young was explicating The Hourly Press; it wasn’t his original idea. Very cogent explanation, though. #proofreadinghelp, anyone?

The Huffington Post hasn’t yet used the feature, and the #headlinehelp channel is currently filled with retweets of theirs or Rosen’s tweet. Well, almost full of retweets — one tea party-loving heckler did not appear to be much interested in #headline #helping: 

Hashtags aren’t perfect aggregators. Earlier this summer, Starbucks’ Twitter contest was hijacked by anti-Starbucks activists, who used the coffee company’s #starbucks and #top3percent hashtags to spread their critical message to some of Starbucks’ biggest fans — and ruin the contest in the process. Given the anti-HuffPo enclaves out in Internetland, the site runs the risk that #headlinehelp will get spammed or polluted.

The real genius of The Hourly Press is that the ‘winner’ isn’t based on raw number of clicks, but on the work of people who are already being followed by site editors; this gets around the problem of the polluted channel. “Note well, though, that those self-selected folks click before they read the thing to which the link points. They make some judgment based on the tweet’s snippet of text accompanying the links, but they may have been terribly, horribly disappointed by the results. Of course, this presumably doesn’t happen too too much since folks would just unfollow Dave in the longer term.” Young’s plan is trickier to execute than just scanning a raw feed, though, and it remains to be seen whether The Huffington Post will get it right — and what tricks their ill-wishers will use to try to subvert it.

Still, it’s a really neat idea that will lead to some creative stuff, and we hope it works out for them.