Information Technology Reference
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8
Figure 8.4
A single com-
ment drove
views on
Smith's site.
Now all this was also the result of more than a bit of luck. Smith's blog follows Google Voice, which
at this writing still has relatively few users. However, it has found itself at the center of a battle
among Apple, AT&T, Google, and, of all entities, the FCC, over access to Apple's App Store. This
generated huge interest in the blogosphere, as the world of blogs and people who write and follow
blogs is called.
Though strong results followed, Smith could have done much more. The ruling the TechCrunch arti-
cle was based on occurred on Friday, August 21. The TechCrunch posting by Michael Arrington,
founder of TechCrunch, went up the same day. (There's rapid response for you!)
Smith didn't get around to blogging on it until the next day, Saturday, and then went to Arrington's
article and commented right after. Fortunately for Smith, people were so interested in Arrington's
article that many of them read the comments—all several hundred of them—quite closely, so closely
that more than a hundred of them clicked on Smith's name to go to his blog.
This was probably helped by the clever title on Smith's blog post. “Apple to FCC: Drop Dead” was
a clever play on words on a famous headline many years ago, when New York City was having
financial troubles. Then-President Ford's lack of interest in having the national government help
was summed up by the New York Daily News in the famous headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”
The resulting furor was so great, it is even thought to have contributed to Ford's narrow loss to
Jimmy Carter in the subsequent presidential election.
