Matt Haughey is the founder of community weblog MetaFilter. One day he got a telemarketer call while he was sitting at home. The cold callers were Critical IP, who had gotten his home phone number from the central database of domain name owners. He posted his outrage on his own weblog:
The gang at Critical IP feel the whois database is a virtual goldmine worth cold-calling and bothering you at home (when I asked them if they got my number from the whois database, they admitted that yes, that was how they obtained it). ...
Matt then asked other bloggers to spread the word that Critical IP was coldcalling people while they were eating supper:
If you feel like sharing this message with anyone else, just copy this HTML and post on your site: Critical IP sucks.
The result: over the next few days, it was noticed that dozens of blogs had linked to Matt's post, all with the same message: "Critical IP sucks". Even today, you may find over two-dozen weblogs linking to Matt's post.
The thought here was that the collective linking of the weblog community can achieve a sort of mob justice, with Google searchers finding the message "Critical IP sucks" whenever they searched for Critical IP.
As collective votes of the weblog community determine what sites you see on Google, Matt's personal site soon became the #1 search result for google searches of "Critical IP".
Its worth noting how frighteningly powerful weblogs are. There's even a name in the weblog community for this phenomenon: Google Bombing. Whether it's done accidentally or more purposefully, the very existence of this phenomenon points to the power of Weblogs to impact the Google search experience.
|