I got pulled into the Google Autlolink debate yesterday. Not because someone at the office brought it up during coffee break. No, it was when Nick Wilson included a link to my Apology item on Web Pro News. His post takes Google to task for not taking part in the widespread debate about its decision to insert links into web content, without the permission of the web site's authors or owners. The comments were actually fairly intelligent, criticizing Google for hiding when it should be telling its side of the story.
The impact on this humble blog was pretty dramatic. Hundreds of readers who would never have dropped by otherwise were suddenly clicking through to Mutually Inclusive for a look.
All the attention was pretty cool. The only problem is, once you get one burst of attention, you start craving more. I feel like an addict, wracking my brain for ways to repeat the phenomenon.
I have to get working on my next attention-getting item. Maybe an expose on Paris Hilton, or a posting about baby bottles that innocently include "nipples" in the title. Anything to get that adrenaline rush.
Not that I know any of the people who clicked through. I don't even know if they have any interest in business communications. Ah, who cares?
I've often heard of The Slashdot Effect, when a small site gets mentioned on Slashdot, and the resulting traffic brings the web servers crashing down, or the web site author uses up their monthly bandwidth limit in about 15 minutes.
I should be so lucky. I'll just have to settle for The Web Pro News Effect The Threadwatch.org Effect.
Doesn't sound as exotic, but then again, the servers haven't crashed, either.
Update: At Nick Wilson's request, I changed the link to his post about Google. The link I used was to his own site, whereas the link that everyone was reading was part of Threadwatch.org, which aggregates a bunch of different postings, along with comments from the various members. Some good discussion there about whether Google can opt out of online conversations about its activities without taking a hit for appearing to not care about what webmasters and others affected by Google's practices are saying about the impact of things like Autolink.
Hi Eric, glad you found it fun :) Threadwatch.org was recently slashdotted for outing google over cloaking practices, it was a great deal of fun aswell!
Any chance you might link to the original article i wrote linking to you? You can find it here: http://www.threadwatch.org/node/1807
No biggie, it's just we're a small site too :-)
Posted by: Nick W | March 11, 2005 at 04:34 AM