The MySpace Crash Gave My Webpage 1,000 Hits In An Hour

Fridays are supposed to be slow days. Still simmering in my recent marketing-exposure victory of being the #1 Charles Cox on Google, I relax. I have a sail to Eagle Island to prepare for. Mark a few charts, check the tides again, and scoot on over to my page on MySpace and notice - hmm - it's not going as fast as it usually does.

I'm not giving it much thought. Shrug it off.

I take Eagle Island (By Strategy) over the weekend, and come back rested. A message on Monday comes in from Chief Nav Greene over in Lake City.

"Dude, is your MySpace messed up?"

I check the support logs and realize something horrible has happened to MySpace over the weekend. While I'm checking the logs, I decide to kill two birds with one stone, and download my logs for The-Agent.net.

That's when I notice it.



Friday the 28th, I got hit. And hit. And hit again. Normally, my page gets 80-90 hits a day. On the 28th, it got 1,031. One thousand hits in a single day. For me - that's unheard of. What happened?

I dig deeper. When did it happen?



11 AM, Friday morning. Where did they come from? Google.

And what were they searching for?



They were searching for reasons their MySpace account got deleted in the horrible crash at 11 AM, Friday July 28th, 2006.

I do what they do. I go to Google, and I search for "myspace account deleted".

A post of mine comes up #1. Not just the first page. Not just the first couple of entries. It's the very first search result.

The first thing they see when their sweaty, MySpace-deprived fingers click "Search". Hell, they could have even clicked "I'm Feeling Lucky" and found me. It's the first thing these desperate souls saw.

And what was it? It was my quick, pointless, asinine blog post about leaving MySpace and wishing a sour-grapes farewell to Rupert Murdoch. Yeah. Back in the day, around December of '05, when I was feeling angsty and had my purple-black hair and Asian Bird Flu shirt on going on about economics-this and economics-that and...

One thousand people in one hour found me, my brand, my identity, my statement, my mark on the world of the living and the dead, and what did they get? Did they get my Five-Minute Slices speech? No. My Tablet PC/7-11 Connection? No. Did they even get a freakin' sailing post? No.

They got me being a whiny bitch about not having enough friends on MySpace.

Wow.
My fifteen minutes of fame and I completely dropped the enchilada.

I'm not sure how I feel, especially in light of the fact that I'm now back on MySpace. Embarassed? A little. But, I'm kind of delighted, in a way, that I can lay #1 claim now to two phrasebits, rather than one. I now am #1 for "charles cox", and #1 for "myspace account deleted".

Guess it pays to be in the right place at the right time.

I suppose the other side of this little parable is that when that time comes - be sure you're saying the right stuff. And not bitching. Or whining. Or bitch-whining. Because that will not look very inspiring.

And, so, we close the book on this story. Maybe my time will come around again. And maybe, when they see me again, they'll see this astute, scholarly observation.

Or maybe they'll just see a picture of Tyler holding a "Sweet Salty Nut" bar up to his balls.

You never know with the Internet.

Oh - for what it's worth, everybody - MySpace is back up now. Thank you for your patience. Have a nice day.

Related Tags: myspace, google, searching, advertising, cybersquatting, speculation, charles cox, the-agent.net