Fireballed

Yesterday I took it upon myself to dip my toe into the waters of Apple punditry, and posted an article about reasons why Apple should kill off the iPod Touch.  I didn’t think too much about it, and thought it might get a small trickle of readers who would stumble upon it through a random google search.  However,  on a whim I tweeted the link over to John Gruber, one of the most famous Apple pundits out there, not really expecting him to take much notice.  Yet, to my great surprise he reposted it (with commentary) on Daring Fireball. Suddenly, I started getting emails to approve numerous comments on my blog, strange, as I rarely ever get comments.  I quickly checked my blog stats and was getting hundreds and hundreds of hits, quickly clicking up into the thousands.  I was fireballed, to misuse a Gruberism, as my site never actually went down.
It was a bit of an amazing experience for a novice blogger such as myself to see how quickly an Apple story spreads over the internet.  There are countless sites devoted to only reposting Apple stories, nothing else, and many more tech news article sites.  My article started appearing on some of these random sites and I have had over 8,000 hits to my blog since yesterday.  That might not seem like a lot, but to someone who’s blog averaged maybe 5 hits a day before that, it was an incredible amount.  It was also interesting to see the headlines other sites used to link to my article.  Most simply used my original headline, which was simple and direct, while others seemed to almost make my article into a rumor, such as “Could Apple replace iPod touch with a budget iPhone?”  This was crazy to me, as I have no knowledge of the inner workings of Apple.  It makes me think how easy it would be for someone to simply create a rumor at of whole cloth that had no truth to it, and it might get picked up by these apple news aggregator sites.

I’ve also gotten lots of comments, the majority very interesting and intelligent, although a couple not so much.  However, I love all of them, even the negative ones, because its created an ongoing discussion and lets others express their ideas on the subject.