-----Original Message-----
From: Hank Mishkoff
Date: Sun, 10 Apr 2005 15:56:04
To:TaubmanSucks@WebFeats.com
Subject: TaubmanSucks Soars into the Blogosphere
[Note: You're probably receiving this update because you expressed an interest in my TaubmanSucks website. If you do not wish to receive these updates, just let me know, and I'll remove you from the list.]
Ever since the TaubmanSucks case ended, I've been getting about 10,000 hits a week on my TaubmanSucks.com website.
A couple of weeks ago, however, the site got more than half a million hits in a single week -- including more than 200,000 hits on a single day!
Why the sudden spike in interest in a case that was dismissed more than two years ago?
On Saturday March 26, a old friend with whom I have had no contact in many years stumbled across the TaubmanSucks site. He emailed me with the suggestion that I should submit the site to a blog named Boing Boing. I had heard of blogs, of course (you'd have to have been living in a cave not to have at least heard of them), but I didn't know much about them at all. But I went to Boing Boing and submitted TaubmanSucks.com via their "suggest a site" link. And in the early hours of Sunday morning, Boing Boing posted a single paragraph (three sentences) about the TaubmanSucks site:
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/27/howto_defend_yoursel.html
Later that day, marketing guru Seth Godin (the author of "Permission Marketing" and other popular books) wrote a longer article about the case entitled, "You can always be mean later (respect works)," in which he concluded:
"Even if you're not a lawyer (or *especially* if you're not a lawyer) the lesson here is pretty clear: it doesn't matter who's 'right.' What matters is that giving people the benefit of the doubt and treating them with respect is not only more fun, it works better too." (Seth's article is online at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/03/you_can_always_.html.)
In the next couple of days the "story" was picked up by dozens of other blogs, each exploring it in its own way:
* In "How To Lawyer When Everyone's Watching," attorney Marty Schwimmer wondered if the lesson was to "never draft a demand letter you wouldn't want to see posted on the recipient's website." His musings engendered an interesting discussion of lawyers, blogs, and ethics, which is online at http://www.corante.com/betweenlawyers/archives/2005/03/28/ethics_how_to_lawyer_when_everyones_watching.php.
* An attorney named Timothy Hadley posed the rhetorical question, "Am I in the wrong field if I do *not* think that law practice is all about manipulating others?" His article, "When lawyers drive a dispute," is online at http://blog.tph-lex.com/archives/entries/000240.html.
* Canadian non-lawyer (I think) Eric Eggertson titled his article, "Why Be Polite when You Can Be Nasty?" In his thoughtful posting, he suggests that, "for the next decade people will say, 'Oh, you're *that* Julie Greenberg' when they meet the woman who pissed off a little guy who used the Web to publicize his cause." You can read the rest of what Eric had to say at http://mutually-inclusive.typepad.com/weblog/2005/03/why_be_polite_w.html.
As far as I can tell, about 50 blogs expressed their own varied opinions about the case, I've collected links to them on my site at http://www.TaubmanSucks.com/blogs.html. I probably could have tracked down more of them, but I've barely had time to respond to the dozens (hundreds?) of emails that have poured into my inbox as a result of three sentences about a two-year-old lawsuit that appeared on a blog a couple of weeks ago.
Hank Mishkoff
Hank@WebFeats.com
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