How are the Mighty Fallen?
Mike Morgan has just received a cease-and-desist notice from the mighty Goldman Sachs; GoDaddy has locked his domain names.
‘Mike who?’ I can hear you ask. I didn’t know about him either until an article appeared in the Daily Telegraph telling of how he had set up a blog with the intention of dishing the dirt on Goldman Sachs. Naturally, I checked his blog, along with many thousands of others who had never heard of him either.
Why would Goldman’s even bother? How could a Goliath like Goldman’s fall into the trap of this tit-for-tat nonsense with a David investment advisor from Florida – a nobody? It’s not as if Morgan was an insider who knows where the bodies are buried. He is just one of a long line of malcontents with a pathological hatred of ‘Goldmine Sachs’, J.P. Morgan, and the rest. The web is full of rage and hatred focussed on Wall Street .
It’s most peculiar. If they’d left him alone Morgan’s sites would have slid back into oblivion. But now he’s hot news. This is a classic example of the coherence that Web Ecologists love to study. A Blog is dribbling along, until suddenly a press story singles it out for particular attention. In e-mails, other blogs, and in the self-referential popular press, the word spreads outward, and the hit rate of Morgan’s blog rockets skyward. A law suit is oxygen for blogs hungry for publicity.
And even if Goldman’s lawyers manage to close him down, he can pop up elsewhere. Others will join in. Just Google ‘Mike Morgan Goldman Sachs’ and you’ll find them. It’ll be interesting whether there’s a critical mass here, or whether it will flare out, and just fade away. I’ll be following the story with interest.
All good research material for Web Ecologists.
And as usual the legal eagles will be raking in the cash. It’s as I’ve always said: “The Internet is a job creation scheme for lawyers!”
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