How John Biggs and Tech Crunch Blew Up the Boles Blogs Network!

This has been a wild week with Apple threatening me with takedown notices and Tech Crunch riding to the rescue and then reflecting on what it means to be a blog publisher and dealing with threats from Apple Fanbois and lessons in legality from anonymous amateur Copyright commenters.

One lesson I learned this week, is that if you contact Tech Crunch for feedback and advice — as I did when I wrote asking if they’d ever seen a Takedown Notice like the one Apple sent me — you better make sure you tell your story first, or Tech Crunch will beat you to the publication punch — and that’s precisely what happened to me, and I couldn’t be happier about it!  Here’s why:

Tech Crunch’s John Biggs took my inquiry and ran with it and published the Apple threat letter and I was amazed by the power of that simple article.  Bigg’s story currently has 44 comments, 192 Facebook Likes, 609 Tweets, 153 LinkedIn Shares and 41 Google+ mentions.  However, those numbers only begin to tell the story of the real Tech Crunch muscle in the marketplace.

Moments after John wrote the story, Go Inside Magazine was swamped with Tech Crunch readers — the Boles Blogs Network runs on WordPress.com, so we were able to handle the spike in hits without a hiccough — who were seeking to read the silly story that ignited the Apple Takedown email.

When I wrote my Black Cat Bone article in Boles Blues a year and a half ago, and that article was featured on WordPress.com’s Freshly Pressed, I thought I’d been run over by a train with over a thousand blog views because of that front page feature on WordPress.com for a day.

Freshly Pressed holds no candle to the hits tsunami that is Tech Crunch.  Here are my WordPress.com stats for GoInside.com as of this morning.  We’re currently at 6,065 views for that Apple article alone because Tech Crunch readers followed the link back to the mother article.  The first day the Tech Crunch article went live, we had over 4,000 hits.

After Tech Crunch scooped my Apple Takedown notice email, I decided to write a follow-up article in Urban Semiotic later the same day to prove to my readers that the email was, in fact, from Apple because so many Tech Crunch commenters were saying the email was a fake.  I dont’ blame them for doubting the authenticity of the email because it was full of bad grammar and nonsensical threats. The Takedown Notice email was later confirmed as authentic by an Apple Customer Support Supervisor.

That second article, not linked from the Tech Crunch article, but included via URL in a response or two from me in the comments stream for Bigg’s piece, currently has 4,418 views on Urban Semiotic.  Here are the WordPress.com stats for UrbanSemiotic.com this week:

In  just a couple of days, Tech Crunch brought over 10,000 views to just two blogs in the 14-blog strong Boles Blogs Network — setting one-day records for us on WordPress.com that  I doubt we will ever be able to beat on our own.

As further evidence of the “Tech Crunch Effect,” I present my Pair Networks server statistics.  I pull all my WordPress.com article images from my personal web server because those remote image calls make it easier to move blog content between platforms if you have to make a change.

Wowser! Tech Crunch crunched my Pair Networks bandwidth, too. Amazing stuff, and I thank John Biggs and Tech Crunch for standing up and doing the right thing by taking on Apple’s Takedown notice for me, and for every blogger in the world. Perhaps, one day, Apple will follow suit and do the right thing, too.

One last amazing statistic is the 50 pingback notifications I received from blogs all over the world to my Go Inside article linked in the body of the Tech Crunch article.  I was notified of those links because splogs all over the world had copied the Tech Crunch article in total and pasted it as a whole “new article” on their blog.  Now that’s a Copyright infringement that deserves the full power of an internet punishment.