The Power of Blogs Inverted

Or how blogs can make one persons name completely toast.

It all started with myself coming across a posting about the first ever Google news bomb on the excellent Google Blogoscoped this morning. Blogoscoped picked up on this posting by John Batelle about how the rants of the owner of msmobile.com about Russell Beattie had turned up when you searched for Russell Beattie on Google News.

Turns out that Google news had inadvertently accepted a disparaging and personally insulting article about Russell Beattie (of Yahoo Mobile) posted by the the owner of msmobiles.com , Jacek Rutkowski. Then I noticed a Threadwatch link about it popping up on Jeremy Zadwodny's blog - looked like the story was spreading, rapidly. So, over to the man himself, Russell Beattie, to explain the whole sorry situation

Turns out that this Jacek character is an ex-Nokia engineer , fired from Nokia for divulging trade secrets, then turned rabidly anti-Nokia and pro-Microsoft, but then pissed off Microsoft by giving Microsoft employees points on their "pro-Microsoft" quotients.

According to Russell Beattie, "he's done much to have me dislike him, starting back in 2000 when I had the displeasure of being on a Sun email list called KVM-Interest where he would rant and use racial slurs attacking people who disagreed with him. Yes, he was once a Java fan, now he's this rabid Microsoft guy. But don't let this reflect badly on Microsoft, they don't like him either and won't invite him to their Mobius conferences any more since he went to one of the first ones, took pictures of everyone and did dosiers on their Pro Microsoft quotient."

It's gotten so weird that this guy has even called Russell at home. No joke.

I wonder if Jacek will do a counter-attack?

Doubtful - he's deleted those stories that are linked to from Google News. Yup - that's the power of the interweb, coming home to roost.

STOP PRESS:
Here's the Jacek commentary that made it into Google news captured by another blog.