The AOL Clusterfuck (pardon my French, I couldn’t resist quoting Mike) became a significant milestone for my blog. All I did was browse around on a Sunday afternoon, when everybody else (i.e. sane people) was probably outdoors. I sensed something big, and as such, my piece, AOL Just Did the Unthinkable – Boycott AOL? was one of the first (the second, to be exact) to report the AOL fiasco.
It got on TechMeme, Reddit and a number of secondary aggregators – that lazy Sunday evening saw 3,5K visitors , and Monday about 11K. (That free bandwidth upgrade from BlogHarbor came just in time, thanks, John). I got quoted in mainstream publications, even in the #1 newsportal in Hungary, and received a voicemail from a WSJ journalist. The reader-invasion dropped since then, and settled at double what I had before. What can I say… it still was a cl*** (OK, I am not gonna repeat it), but hey, thank you, AOL.
As for the prediction, here’s a quote from my original piece:
“Update #1 (8/6): I’m going out on a limb here with this prediction: as they realize the magnitude of what they did (or if they don’t, due to the PR nightmare) AOL will apologize, the fingerpointing starts and heads will roll. They will remove the download link. Not before anyone who wanted the data will have obtained it though.”
Let’s see:
- Apology happened the day after
- Download link was removed the same day, within hours
- Heads are rolling now
Now that its’ proven I have the magic power, I need to be careful what I predict next: something to do with my career, financial status, marital status… ? Oh, well, predicting is a lot of work 🙂
Update (8/21): Enterprise 2.0 is deleted from Wikipedia, but Clusterfuck has an entry. What the f.. cluster:-)
Tags: AOL, DOJ, Google, boycott, data+mining, privacy, search+data, search+logs, clusterfuck, techcrunch
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