1/8/2006
Blogs are dangerous for those not in the know
For the last week the German blogger scene was busy with two rather similar incidents: Renate Holst, an employee of the federal court »Sozialgericht Bremen« threatened to sue Shopblogger, a very popular blogger here, because he used the term »Sozialgericht Bremen« in the title on one of his posts that then appeared on the first result page in Google for this term. Almost the same time, Günther Klum, the father of supermodel Heidi Klum, threatened to sue another popular blogger, because he used Heidi’s name in one of his posts titles.
Both Klum and Holst seem to have made a serious impact - but not in the way they expected. The threatened bloggers posted about the incidents and immediately got a lot of coverage from other blogs. Through worldwide inter blog connections the stories made it to well read US blogs and even made the digg front page. Then mainstream media kicked in: The popular German magazine Focus did an interview with Renate Holst, where she managed to even make matters worse by explaining, she just wanted the blog article in question to disappear. Some call this censorship. Meanwhile Klum managed to piss of the well respected Handelsblatt newspaper.
So what’s the punchline? By 2006, Weblogs have established extremely powerful networks. Anyone with an interest in public relations should be very careful about attacking well networked bloggers. Some people say, there is no such thing as »Bad Publicity«, as it is always good to be in the spotlight. I believe Holst and Klum have done a lot of damage to their brands’ reputation though, and neither of them expected this to happen. They simply underestimated the power of the word of mouth.
January 9th, 2006 at 2:01 am
Instead of these other people threatening the bloggers - for instance where a blog showed up in search results before the actual website - maybe these people need to take a look at why others sites show up before their own.. they could actually use TIPS from these bloggers instead of threatening to sue.
January 15th, 2006 at 10:37 pm
Google.
There ya go. Google will sue me.
Idiots.
January 16th, 2006 at 6:53 am
Aleeya said:
“Instead of these other people threatening the bloggers - for instance where a blog showed up in search results before the actual website - maybe these people need to take a look at why others sites show up before their own.. they could actually use TIPS from these bloggers instead of threatening to sue.”
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My God, so true
January 17th, 2006 at 10:35 pm
Es waren ja nicht nur das Sozialgericht Bremen und die Webseite von Heidi Klum betroffen, sondern noch einige andere Internetseiten. Google führt noch zum xten Weltkrieg… und dies am Ende nur weil a vor b gelistet ist. Na dann Gute Nacht.