I know, a website launch isn’t really a big deal, even a marijuana website launch on the “High Holiday” of the cannabis community, April 20th. But it’s not every 4/20 that someone launches a marijuana website, and that person has over 300,000 followers on Twitter.

Many of you may know who @stillblazingtho is, but there may be some of our readers who are unfamiliar with him or may not even have a Twitter account (gasp!).

For a bit of quick background, I first saw @stillblazingtho pop up on twitter last year, and began including him in my “Follow Friday” posts, which is a tradition on Twitter of letting your other followers know who they should follow, done on Friday – Twitter is not rocket science. I’m not sure how many followers he had at this time, and I don’t remember noticing until he was up to about 18,000.

That was 5 or 6 months ago. He now has 300,000+, a virtual army of cannabis users and supporters. There may be cannabis user accounts with more – @SnoopDogg – but @stillblazingtho is not a celebrity and built his following on Twitter without the help of other social networks or celebrity backers. His empire has come on the strength of his tweets alone.

I got a change to interview the man himself about Twitter, his website, and more.

First I asked him about his massive Twitter following and where it came from. “I attribute that to the vast number of people throughout the world who know the truth about marijuana and want to spread it to those that don’t,” he told me. “I also attribute it to the hilarious nature of many of my tweets, which are meant to educate while also entertain.”

In the ago of the internet, social networks exert a lot of influence, with Twitter even rivaling its larger competitor – Facebook – in influence worldwide. But as is the case with every successful venture or brand, diversification is key, and a natural extension of his massive Twitter base would be a website.

“I wanted to start a website to have a place for my followers to interact and learn and educate each other,” SBT said. “I wanted a place that could reach a larger population of people, that may not use twitter. I wanted a place where I could post all the most up to date information on marijuana, that can not possibly fit in 140 characters. There is so much information available about marijuana, I just wanted to a place to be able to share and organize it all.”

But why should people come to his site, when there are so many others already up and running? “It’s going to contain all the most recent marijuana information, along with an online community for people to interact amongst each other,” he said of the site. “They will  have the ability to participate in daily contests, and have all relevant marijuana information at their fingertips. Many of the marijuana sites similar to this are not kept up to date and that is crucial in educating the masses on marijuana.”

The site won’t be complete at the launch on 4/20 but many components will be in place, and the site will be constantly updated, with new pieces being added all the time. But the website traffic of 4/20 is just too big to pass up, especially for a website and brand trying to expand beyond a huge Twitter following.

- Joe Klare