Mashable Hysterical Over Twitter Outage

As you may or may not have noticed, Twitter.com disappeared for about an hour last night. Their DNS records were apparently compromised by someone claiming to be the (previously unheard-of) “Iranian Cyber Army”. The DNS entry, which essentially tells your web browser where to find individual sites, was apparently changed by some mischief makers to point to the wrong place. Some users saw a message from the “Army”, while others simply couldn’t access the site. It was back to normal in an hour or so.

It is unknown whether the “Army” acted in response to my repeated exclamations that “Twitter Must Die“.

It’s not the first time Twitter has gone down, though it’s certainly the most spectacular. Unfortunately, the crew at Mashable.com, who (as we’ve repeatedly noted, are obsessed with Twitter), reacted to the outage with Hindenburg-style hysterics.

Ben Parr, Mashable’s intrepid co-editor and repeatedly failed entrepreneur according to his own web site, breathlessly reported that Twitter had been hacked (a statement he later tweaked for accuracy purposes). Parr stated:

For one of the world’s most popular websites to be compromised and taken down, even for a few minutes, is a big problem. This type of thing should never happen, regardless of who is to blame.

You tell ‘em Ben! This should never happen! Twitter should never make the rookie mistakes you made with your own start-ups.

In his follow-up piece, Parr grew far more hysterical (and repeated the inaccurate, irresponsible “hacking” charge). Get a load of this:

We’re still in shock over what has just transpired. Twitter was just hacked.

…

Little compares to what has happened tonight. Even if it was a third-party DNS attack, Twitter still gets the black eye.

This is unacceptable for one of the world’s top 20 most-visited websites. There needs to be accountability for this situation (no matter if it’s within Twitter or within a third party), and a more detailed explanation is warranted. Twitter also needs to find a way to assure that this never happens again.

This is a tragedy beyond compare! It is unacceptable! Something must be done!

To their credit, some more intelligent Mashable readers called out Parr for over-reacting and being absurdly dramatic. But most of his readers joined right in:

Who knows if the hackers got our passwords and personal information?

I’m thinking about deleting my Twitter after this….It seems so unsafe now!

Do these people have all my info???

What will I do with out Twitter?

Can’t connect either from venezuela… There’s a hole in my heart and is killing me forever (8).. and is only being there for 30 min now =|,

I am having withdrawal symptoms already. Twitter down, not good :[

God Damn those fuckers, and Twitter has got to do something about the God Damn security on its website… damn it I am pissed off

PRAISE JESUS. TWITTER’S BACK.

Ben, you and your readers need to get outside and get some fresh air. You’ll feel better, I promise.

Google Garbage™ Post-mortem 2

Experiment #2 is complete, and the results were even more absurd than last time.

This time I created 20 posts based on the latest upward-trending Google keywords, and put in even less effort to make them anything but cursory. In addition, I slapped AdSense ads above and below the posts to see if I could catch any of the visitors on the way out.

Though I’m choosing these keywords at random from Google’s list of trends, last time I happened to pick a topic with legs (as it were), “Amanda Knox”. Though the web was full of info about this young woman, my post of pics was enough to triple my traffic. And as new developments occurred in her murder trial, my inane post returned to the top slot in my traffic reports.

This time I didn’t have that golden combination of sex and death working for me. Most of the hot keywords were pretty mundane, with the possible exception of the gay porn-star cat burglar, and the obligatory “Tiger Woods Affair photos” post, which continued to be popular even after the photos themselves disappeared. Perhaps if I could have been bothered to host them myself, this would have been a bit more popular.

In any case, I struck gold nonetheless. Unpredictably, this recipe for “Crack Pie” has proved unbelievably popular, generating about 8000 visitors in two days. As I write this at 5:00 pm on Thursday, Google Analytics says I’ve has over 6500 visitors so far today alone. The post has also been linked to by several prominent sites, which will no doubt increase my profile immensely in terms of Google. In fact, I’ve already seen my rankings improve for my primary keywords, thanks to this ridiculous little exercise.

As for the ads, only 1-2% of visitors actually click on them, which isn’t spectacular. However, with every day that goes by, my time putting together the posts becomes more profitable. Right now that time may have netted $10 – 15/hour, but by tomorrow that could be $20 or $25. By next year, who knows?

So should I do it again? That’s something to think about. It’s certainly not making the internet a better place, but I’m not sure that’s my job.

Nobody dreams of growing up to run a junkyard…

Tiger Woods Affair Photos

Tiger Woods Affair Photos

Tiger Woods Affair Photos

Here are complete list of alleged mistresses of Tiger Woods with their photos:

Rachel Uchitel	Jaimee Grubbs	Kalika Moquin
Jamie Jungers	Mindy Lawton	Cori Rist
Holly Sampson	Julie Postle	Unidentified Mistress No. 9
Unidentified Mistress No. 10	Veronica Siwik-Daniels a.k.a Joslyn James

What is this post? See here.