What happens when a blogger rants on a slow news day?
Let’s follow the journey of how one blogger’s MySpace rant spread across the net, led to an official comment from Fox Interactive Media, and has now become the subject of meta-discussions about what it all means to the blogosphere in just four short days.
January 20th, 2008, 4:15 PM - Blogger Simon Owens posts a rant against MySpace spam and declares January 30, 2008 “International Delete Your MySpace Account Day .
January 21, 2008, 10:54 PM - Popular social networking news site Mashable.com picks up the story .
January 22. 2008 - The Mashable story is submitted to Digg.com and goes to the front page a day later. As of this post, it has 5258 diggs.
January 22, 2008, 12:13 PM - Without a hint of irony, a Facebook group devoted to International Delete Your MySpace Account Day Group is started.
January 22, 2008 - The International Delete Your MySpace Account Day meme lights up the blogosphere, with Technorati recording 75 blog reactions and Google tracking 5,290 hits .
January 23. 2008 - In a story about MySpace’s deal to host clips of BBC content on MySpace Video, Rebekah Horne, vice president of Fox Interactive Media and MySpace in Australia and New Zealand is asked to comment on the meme:
One blogger has declared January 30th “International Delete Your MySpace Account Day”.
But MySpace doubts that this will have a great impact on their network.
“This Delete-Your-MySpace day is just about being controversial,” Ms Horne said.
“MySpace is still the biggest social networking site in the world.”
January 23, 2008, 11:39 PM - Simon blogs about the reaction and notes the story has also been picked up by MSNBC, which fuels more bloggers to post the story.
January 24, 2008, 10:06 PM - Mashable.com uses the uproar to define what is becoming a formula for getting attention online :
1) Pick a popular target
2) Find reasons to nitpick something, even if they all have easy fixes
3) Say something outlandish about how it should go away
4) Reap the backlinks and media attention of “outraged” members of the blogosphere
5) Hit mainstream media as they always get amused when we dance like trained monkeys for them
We still have five more days to go, and Owens claims a wire service recently interviewed him so this story is still unfolding, and how far it goes remains to be seen.
