Hell Has No Fury Like a Publicist Scorned: Last December, Michael Arrington of TechCruch wrote a blistering post on New York publicist Lois Whitman, who irritated the powerful commentator by endlessly spamming publications and comporting herself in a manner Arrington described as “obnoxious.” The post created a tempest in a teapot yet the uproar largely died over the holidays. But Monday brought a fresh post on Whitman, as her experience will be a talking point at a Colorado event entitled, “Social Media for Skeptics: The Care and Feeding of Bloggers,” being held in Broomfield on Tuesday, May 19th. The event, hosted by blogger Dave Taylor and Doyle Albee of Metzger Associates, seeks to discuss the differences between reporters and bloggers and how to avoid triggering a negative response a la Whitman. Upon learning of the event, Whitman began a public dialogue with Albee, a fascinating back-and-forth which in and of itself offers instruction on the right and wrong ways to represent oneself on the digital stage.
Editor’s Note : We have been informed by way of a personal and thoughtful message from the organizers that the Social Media for Skeptics event has been postponed. We will update our readers when the seminar is rescheduled.
Too Big To Fail: Google’s outage yesterday morning, caused by mistakenly routing traffic through Asia, is probably old news at this point, but it does provide some food for thought. VentureBeat provided an interesting post about what happened to internet traffic during this time. Data show that ISP traffic fell off dramatically, but perhaps more interestingly there was a precipitous drop off in traffic to the sites of MercantileCircle, which manages sites for 750,000 small businesses. This data begs the question of what impact an extended Google outage might have on commerce, to say nothing of the internet. Is Google essential infrastructure? Of course one might expect the impact to lessen over time as people and sites (who may imbed Google search) switch to existing – if slightly inferior – alternatives. The only silver lining is that Google’s ten-figure profitability will likely keep it from joining the ranks of the bailout crowd.
