Mac Attack!
Wow, I guess I am a bit naive, but I cannot believe how much traction my "Switch back" post has gotten over the weekend. It must have been a slow news cycle or something...a I guess Rita didn't destory Houston, so everyone had some extra time on their hands to talk about something else? I've known for a long while now that taking on Apple is the way to get hits, but this is ridiculous.
First, in about 26 hours I had over 100 comments on the post itself, so I thanked everyone and shut them down (I was getting tired of moderating them). This had the obvious (in hindsight) effect of pushing the responses and comments out into the blogosphere. I got links from Scoble, MacSurfer OreillyNet, and Digg, and the Guardian and dozens of other sites as well. Following my referrers, the amazing thing is that each one of *those* sites had dozens of comments as well. It's incredible
Here's a correllary to the How To Get Hits meme: If you want to discover how thick your skin is, take on the Mac Zealots. Man, I've been insulted in just about every way possible. Well, I didn't read anything about my mother, but I saw pretty much everything else one could say questioning my intellect, my profession, my education, my psychological stability, etc. One guy called me a "dilettante" which I'm still trying to figure out. Most questioned my motives: first that I trolling for traffic, second that I was doing it for the ad revenue (as if irate Mac fans click on a lot of text-ads), and best of all someone accused me of being a Microsoft mole. That's priceless.
Honestly, my original thought was really that I'd throw this rant out there - it took me 20 minutes to tap out, by the way, it's not like I spent a lot of time on it - generate a moderate level of controversy, get some comments and that'd be it. Like most of my posts, actually. The fact that I'm still seeing links and comments four days later is pretty amazing to me. I definitely underestimated the nerve this would touch. Live and learn on that one.
The most apt comment I saw was, "I think this guy just likes pulling people's chains," which is mostly true. I don't swim upstream solely to do so, but I make an effort to pick out the times when I am swimming upstream already and write about that. What I've discovered in my years of blogging is that usually I've found a kernel of something that a lot of other people are thinking but hadn't put their finger on yet. If you read many of the comments out there, every fifth person says something like, "I totally agree." or "this guy is right." Those are nice. If I was getting nothing but hate comments, I'd question my sanity, but if even a few people see what I'm saying, then it's totally worth the negative karma flowing my way.
Quick, someone give me a hug. ;-)
-Russ