Lately, several websites have scraped my blog posts and repurposed my content as their own.  I know I’m not the only person whose blog is being plagiarized in this way.  But I wonder if authors like Chris Brogan, John Moore and Tim Ferriss realize it’s happening to them, too.

Say Hello to Joel Goldstein, Marketing Douchebag

Last week, Chris Brogan wrote The Audacity of Free, a blog post about the flaws in a “freemium” pricing system.  But if you went to Joel Goldstein’s website, you’d think Joel himself wrote that article.  That’s because he scrapes and reposts other people’s blog content as his own.  (In Joel’s defense, this particular post includes the disclaimer “Posts are pulled via RSS feed from writer’s blog.”  But since the name or website of the actual writer isn’t included, logic would lead a visitor to believe the “writer’s blog” being pulled from is Joel’s own.)

Likewise, Joel’s “Would You Miss Denny’s” think piece is really an uncredited scrape of John Moore’s long-running “Would You Miss [Brand Name]?” theme at Brand Autopsy.  And, unlike the Brogan post above, the Moore piece is reposted without a disclaimer referring to any other writer at all; it’s listed as having been written by “admin”.

But Wait, It Gets Better…

Unsurprisingly, this isn’t the first time Joel Goldstein has been caught plagiarizing legitimate authors.  Last month, Ajit Verghese noted that the “About the Author” page from the website for Goldstein’s book A Professional’s Guide to Social Media steals not one but two testimonials originally written about Tim Ferriss‘s 4-Hour Workweek and attributes the sentiment to Goldstein instead.

At that same time, Peter Kim accused Goldstein of plagiarising one of David Armano‘s Logic+Emotion blog posts.  When confronted, Goldstein evidently took down the page on his site that used Armano’s work without attribution.  However, judging by the URL structure of that now-missing page, it matches the structure of the Brogan lift mentioned above, which means it was probably a page created by the same blog scraper.  If Goldstein truly doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong, as he asserted with Kim, he must also not believe that defending his position is worth the hassle.

Your Work Speaks for Itself

Chris Brogan, John Moore and Tim Ferriss are well-known and respected names in social media.  The relevance of their ideas and influence over thousands of readers is what makes their posts worth stealing.  They don’t have time to hunt down everyone who claims authorship of their ideas because they’re too busy doing actual work.  (Except possibly Ferriss, who’s probably too busy not doing work.  But I digress…)

On the other hand, Joel Goldstein (via his LinkedIn profile) claims to be a specialist in “social media, online branding and internet marketing” despite just joining Twitter in March of 2009 (unless you count his underused personal Twitter profile, which he launched in December of 2008).  Then there’s the matter of his chronically unwatched YouTube channel, and his business website that includes “viral videos” (yes, really) among his services.

Some people work hard to earn their reputations.  Others work hard to steal the reputations of those who’ve earned them.  For hacks like Goldstein to make a living by feasting on the grey areas that surround unlicensed attribution (or outright theft) of other people’s work is deplorable.  And for that, he makes our ever-growing list of Marketing Douchebags.

Let’s face it: the Internet is crawling with marketers.  Some of them are legitimate professionals, whose years of experience and insight can help your business find new customers.

And some of them are just douchebags.

Lately, I’ve come across so many people whose “marketing efforts” (if they can truly be categorized as such) are so confoundingly desperate and /or blatantly unethical, it’s become aggravating / nauseating / downright infuriating.  I stare, mystified, at their fraudulent websites, stolen content and automated multi-level marketing schemes and I wonder, “Am I the only person who thinks this is all bullshit?”

Of course not.  It doesn’t take a genius to spot a charlatan.  It’s just that you just haven’t had the pleasure of stumbling across these same snake oil salesmen yourself.  But finding them just got easier, because now they’re on display at Marketing Douchebags.

What Makes a Marketing Douchebag?

The marketing world is rife with fraud by degree.  Lures, misdirection and overemphasis have long been employed to direct potential consumers toward the upside of a deal while minimizing exposure to the negative.  But that’s not the kind of age-old chicanery we’re talking about here.

To qualify as a Marketing Douchebag, the offender must:

• Behave in a HIGHLY unethical manner
• Offer services of little to no actual value
• Pollute social media channels with useless crap
• Claim experience that doesn’t match the facts
• Give us reason to doubt s/he actually exists, or
• Lie blatantly

Not that ethically bankrupt marketing is anything new.  Snake oil has long been sold in all shapes and sizes.  But when that snake oil comes with a URL, it’s much easier to dissect.

Why Bother?

As I mentioned at the end of my Socialnomics review, I believe in the positive potential of social media to improve the way we live, work and communicate.  But those of us who work legitimately in this field have to hold ourselves accountable, in terms of both quality and ethics.  If we allow the unscrupulous fast-buck artists to hijack the conversation, we’ve squandered our opportunity for change.  Don’t let the bastards win.

This week I highlighted several websites that are repurposing my content as their own, or (in a less litigious scenario) reposting my work without my permission as a way to increase their own traffic.  Surprisingly, I learned via the comments and Twitter conversations about this situation that a vast majority of the people I talk to don’t believe in intellectual property or the inherent value of ideas, and feel that piracy and conceptual theft are not only defensible but necessary for the advancement of humanity.

In the past, I’ve been a devil’s advocate on both sides of this debate.  I hate abuse of copyright law by corporations that stranglehold ideas and concepts, yet I appreciate the same law’s ability to protect individuals from having their ideas and concepts stolen and profited upon by those same corporations.  I even admit it’s illogical to argue that anyone can own an idea.  But now, after talking with Nick Pinkston, Steve Klabnik and Mary Hartney, I’m open to a new concept:

Ideas are worthless, and no one should ever be paid for them.

Our comments and conversations about this point were a bit scattered, but in a nutshell, here’s what I learned:

• Tangible goods have value due to scarcity
• Tangible goods have value due to physical production costs
• Ideas have no production cost
• Ideas are infinite, and therefore cannot be scarce
• Sharing ideas benefits the world
• Restricting ideas harms the world
• Therefore, ideas — which are inherently worthless — must be shared freely

Note that, to clarify, books should not be stolen, since — even though they merely contain ideas, which are free and therefore worthless — they incurred physical production costs and are property that is legally owned.  However, books should be photocopied for free and then disseminated, and CDs should be burned and shared without profit.  (This is a paraphrase of Nick’s multi-tweet response to my book-related question.)

Given that, I’ve drawn the following conclusions:

• Artists, authors, musicians, politicians, philosophers and linguists produce no work of actual value, and therefore should not be compensated.
• Unlike those who originate ideas, those who repeat the ideas in a tangible form incur physical replication costs and therefore should be compensated.
• Whenever possible, those physical representations should be copied and shared without actually paying the producers of the materials.

All of which adds up to one question: if ideas are worthless, and the dissemination of them is likely to incur more cost for the reproducers than anyone would advocate paying for, why develop new ideas in the first place?

The answer (at least via this debate) is that ideas are a means to an end, and that end should always be the production of a tangible good that can be owned.  So, to take the extreme long view, concepts like freedom, justice and identity are only of value in the sense that they permit individuals to produce and harvest rice, grain and wood.

To extrapolate further, it’s logical to presume that any non-tangible goods Nick, Steve and Mary have produced are free for the taking — or repurposing — by anyone else.  In that case, I have some suggestions:

• Steve already said that anything on his blog is free for the taking, including his code.  He’s even cool with you putting your own name on it and passing it off as your own.  High school and college students: this means you can use Steve’s code in any classes where original code is required, since his code is your code.  Enjoy.
• Nick is the co-founder of GearHeadz, a company that makes tangible items.  However, since Nick doesn’t believe in patents or intellectual property [CLARIFICATION: See comments below], it’s safe to say that anything intangible produced by GearHeadz is also yours for the taking.  That means you now have a corporate identity, a business plan, a marketing strategy and a relationship with investors like AlphaLab — all you have to do is demand that Nick turn them over to you.  Because those are all intangible concepts and relationships, they’re simply ideas; not sharing them with you, by Nick’s own admission, hurts other people.  (He also invites you to use his name, as long as you’re not impersonating him.)
• Mary’s case would seem to be a grey area, since she works for the Baltimore Sun and, therefore, it could be argued that the Sun “owns” her work — “copyright infringement” and “fair use,” etc.  But the problem is that the Sun is a newspaper, and since newspapers are simply physical representations of ideas (as per Nick’s valuation of books, above), it’s reasonable to conclude that anything the Baltimore Sun (or any other newspaper) prints is free to be redistributed or re-sold with no fee due to the paper, save for the actual cost of purchasing a physical copy.  (And since that information is also available for free online, you can simply copy and paste the articles and then reprint your own Baltimore Sun in your own city.  Have fun!)

I could go on, but the possibilities are limitless.  The bottom line is: ideas are worthless.  What matters is who can sell the most tangible goods the fastest, so they can earn more resources, with which they can buy more tangible goods.  Ideas merely get in the way… except for that part where they’re so important for the future of society that they must be transmitted freely.

Later, we should all debate whether anyone can truly own anything tangible either, since concepts like the state, law, ownership and identity are all intangible ideas and, therefore, unenforceable and inherently worthless.  But it’s already been a long week, and some of us have grain to produce.

Yesterday I blogged about my experience at the 2009 Small Press Expo.  That post was commented on and retweeted by several readers, which I appreciate.  It was also reposted on three websites of varying legitimacy, by other people and without my permission.  That, I’m not so cool with.

Repost #1 – John Lessnau’s Traffic-Building Scheme

I don’t know John Lessnau, but his blog’s author bio states that he “create[s] web sites and web services that are evolutionary and revolutionary because there is too much warmed over crap on the Internet for my liking.”  More succinctly, his Twitter profile explains that he drives “web traffic and fast cars,” so his revolutionary evolutions must be working.  And while his recent tweets indicate that, like most of us, he’s not a fan of spammers, he apparently is a fan of aggregating articles from around the web and re-listing them in some kind of information buffet — my own included.

Lessnau’s About page cites him as the founder of two apparently successful text link ad services, which may explain his propensity for mining other people’s work for his own fun and profit.  And although I’m flattered that Mr. Lessnau (or perhaps one of his text scrapers) thought yesterday’s post was worth including in his list of “Articles About Making Money as of September 28, 2009” (as opposed to considering it more of the “warmed over crap on the Internet”), I find fault with his presumption that I (or anyone else) would naturally enjoy being linked to from his infoglut menagerie.

Mr. Lessnau states that I (or anyone else who’d rather not have their work scraped to his site) can use his automated contact form to request that my blog be removed from his “RSS resource list.”  Funny; I didn’t realize that the default online procedure was to build ad networks around other people’s work unless they choose to opt out.  In that case, I’d also like to opt out of any service that repurposes my video, images, audio, likeness and name, please.

(And yes, I realize he uses a picture of Tom Waits as his author photo.  That’s beside the point.)

Repost #2 – PulpLit.com

Another blog-as-traffic-misdirector ploy, PulpLit reposted the first 491 characters (or 79 words) of yesterday’s blog post — oddly cutting themselves off mid-word — and then supplied a link to my full article.  Classy.

Their About page says: “Our objective is to provide our users with the most comprehensive database of sources to the comics publishing world.”  While I’m not really sure what that means, I’m also not sure who PulpLit is, since the only “author” they list is someone named admin.  (He’s the guy / girl / mongoose who “wrote” my blog post.)

Best PulpLit design choice: at the bottom of my hijacked post’s page, their three-column format is filled with the exact same column (of similarly “aggregated” material), three times over.  That’s the comprehensivest.

Repost #3 – CelebrityTwitterGossip.com

This one is my favorite.  Not only did they repost my entire article (without attribution), but they kept my original hyperlinks (and then added their own keyword links via AdBrite).  Alas, not all of their automated scraping goes so smoothly.  At least they had the good taste to use the same blog template I do.

So… What Do We DO About Plagiarism?

In Lessnau’s case, he at least invites people to opt out of his text scraping scheme (even if they never opted in).  The other two sites are no different from thousands of other ad farms, spam ovens, linkbaiters and domain squatters out there; I just happened to notice them because their spiders noticed me first.  This wasn’t the first time it happened and it won’t be the last.

You might ask, “But who gets hurt in this situation?  It’s just one website duplicating free content from another.”  Which is technically true, except that:

• No one asked my permission to reprint my own work,
• No one credited me as the author of my own work, and
• All three of those sites are conceivably pushing ads based upon my work.

Not that I’m expecting to make money off blog ads.  (If I were, I’d have installed them already.)  But my words are making pennies per click for someone else out there, and I’m not seeing a peso of it.

The web’s inherently permissive culture, in which information is free and intended to be shared, remixed and reconceived, is unfortunately very exploitable by the people most inclined to abuse loopholes in the system — or to steal other people’s work outright.  And as much as I reject the strictures of copyright, it’s clear that something has to be done to prevent the bottom feeders from profiting at the expense of actual creators.  Creative Commons is a step in the right direction, but it still doesn’t stop things like Douglas Coupland’s conceptual theft from Ze Frank.

The onus of accountability shouldn’t be on the creators; it should be on the thieves.  I’m not entirely sure how we’re supposed to stem the tide, but I do have three suggestions:

• Be vigilant in monitoring where your own work turns up online.  If you’re not credited, or if you feel like your work is being misused, demand that it be removed from the site.
• Since most of us would go broke filing DMCA takedown notices every time a robot, scoundrel or multi-level marketer stole our work, I’d also like to suggest the creation of a Bloggers Legal Defense Fund (unless something like that already exists — anyone have any such links?)
• License your own work.  You don’t have to be George Lucas to manage your creative assets all the way to fame and fortune.  If what you’re writing, filming or otherwise creating is good (or relevant) enough to be plagiarized by someone else, it’s good enough to be licensed for reprinting in other sources.  Think of it like “guest blogging,” but you’d actually get paid.  (And at least you’d have a tiny war chest built up for litigation during those times when an informal request isn’t enough to make things right.)

Anyone else have any ideas on how we can keep the bastards from winning?

UPDATE (9/30): In a stroke of irony that only the Internet could produce, this post itself has been listed as one of 50 Posts About Working with Video on the Web as of September 29, 2009 by Perry Multimedia.  If you’re wondering, Perry Multimedia’s services include “any form of project you may need help with that would utilize web sites, audio, video, CD Rom/DVD, video conversions, or even designs or copy for print or other forms of desktop publishing.”  So, really, every form of communication possible.

Doubly interesting: that list of 50 blog posts was scraped by something called The RSSdoodle, created by (drumroll, please)… John Lessnau!  (See Repost #1 above.)  Lessnau describes this widget as “yet another plugin that will bring relevant content to your blog in an automated fashion.”  Evidently, this “relevant” content can even include blog posts that expose said content as a legally-questionable sham.  Download yours today!

While researching Twitter for a client this morning, I searched the phrase “learning social media” (without quotes) and found the following results:

Must be an interesting article, right?

Wrong.  It’s a link lure to a news item from a consulting firm called Gerson Lehman Group, which calls itself “the global marketplace for expertise.”  Clicking that lure actually takes you to this page:

The “article” is basically a statement: friends and followers don’t necessarily equal paying customers.  Fine; we’ve been hearing this for years.  But note that the analysis was done by someone named “GLG Expert Contributor,” and published at bit.ly.  Last time I checked, bit.ly was a URL shortener, not a site that accepted critical analysis of business markets.

Notice also the disclaimer: “Analyses are solely the work of the authors and have not been edited or endorsed by GLG.”  So, evidently, “the global marketplace for expertise” allows anonymous users to post spurious analysis to their site.  Good to know.

Meanwhile, who are all these Twitter users who found this article to be so worthwhile as to retweet it (or, more accurately, to independently tweet it of their own volition, all in rapid succession)?  Clicking through to their profiles reveals that most of them tweet practically identical content.  For example:

A more legit-looking profile is that of InterpidMarktr, who claims to be a stay-at-home dad who’s just trying to make money online.  Or Gary Cooper, who’s been “making money on the internet since 2001,” probably with the help of tweets like this.  And I’m sure Donnie Wilson, lead singer of the one-hit wonder R&B group Profyle, would be interested to know that his likeness has been appropriated for a Twitter profile that pushes these same spam messages, links to a defunct Facebook account, and even uses his MySpace photo as his Twitter avatar.  (Either that or his Twitter account was hacked… or he’s in the same marketing scheme as everyone else; his MySpace profile does say he’s trying to finish med school, which must be expensive.)

Even the profiles that appear to be semi-legit, like that of Camisera Clothing, list the same spam links among their other tweets, which implies that they’ve either been hacked or are knowingly complicit in some sort of referral scheme.  (Not too much of a stretch, since Camisera has previously been forced to return money for selling counterfeit goods.)  But a referral scheme for what?

One clue: the profile of Tony Coulson, included in the stream above, links directly to TweetTank, an affiliate marketing scheme that promises you can “add followers and make money on Twitter” — earn $500 a day, 99% automated! (Warning: the page that link opens also executes a “do you really want to close this tab and miss out on these great deals?” script when you try to exit.)

So, if I had to guess, I’d say that the profiles listed above are some of the many people who’ve bought into TweetTank and are now flooding Twitter with identical spam accounts designed to lure in other users.  I don’t know what Twitter’s policy is for Amway-style marketing, but I do know that a rise in this kind of activity can’t be good for anyone.

If Profyle has known this was in the cards, maybe Donnie Wilson would have stayed in that desert…

Yesterday’s news that Disney is buying Marvel has touched off a firestorm of deliberation.  Whether the move will help Marvel in the long run is debatable, but any serious consideration of the business implications is irrelevant; it’s the potential Disney-Marvel crossovers that have everyone’s geek flag flying high.

With so many icons now under their roof, from Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to Spider-Man and the X-Men, the  mashup opportunities are almost infinite.  As such, I felt compelled to offer ten possibilities we probably won’t be seeing.

1. Secret Eeyorigins — Everyone’s favorite depressive donkey narrates the origin stories of Marvel’s hottest heroes!  First Issue: The Silver Surfer! (“Wasn’t much of a power cosmic anyway…”)
2. God of Big Thunder Mountain — The waiting time for this classic Disneyland ride quintuples when the mine cars screech to a halt at the mountain’s summit, where riders are treated to a 45-minute choreographed fight sequence between Thor and Loki, set to the music of Queen.
3. Toy Story 4: Endgame — Buzz Lightyear’s catchphrase “To infinity — and beyond!” is finally revealed to be his brainwashed directive from Thanos, who tricks Buzz into giving him the Infinity Gauntlet, which he then uses to annihilate all life in the universe.  (Woody’s attempts to counter with the Ultimate Nullifier prove futile.)
4. Punisher War Journal: Tigger Happy — Convinced that a talking orange tiger couldn’t possibly be that happy without nonstop access to crystal meth, Frank Castle pays a visit to the Hundred Acre Wood.  Oh bother.
5. Space Mountain Redux — The Magic Kingdom’s only vaguely serious ride becomes downright terrifying after unplanned attacks by the Brood.
6. The Mighty Ducks 4: Puck Strikes Back — Emilio Estevez’s plucky adolescents are in over their heads yet again, but this time they get a hand from an unlikely ally: Puck, the Canadian midget from Alpha Flight.  Hilarity — and a moral about the unconditional acceptance of little people — ensues.
7. Herbie Goes to Genosha — When America’s only sentient Volkswagen is revealed to be a mutant, his jovial demeanor and deft cornering ability prove to be no match for the Sentinels.
8. Disney Princesses in the Savage Land — A lame excuse for undersexed Imagineers to draw Snow White in a leopard-print thong, nimbly escaping pterodactyls.  Also, Baloo shows up for no reason.
9. Chicken Little 2: The Kree-Skrull War — The element of surprise is almost lost, but Earth once again refuses to heed Chicken Little’s warning because “the Skrulls are coming” sounds far too much like “the sky is falling” for anyone to care.
10. Ichabod Crane: Ghost Rider — ‘Nuff said.

Lately, I’ve been discontent with the state and quality of social media.  I’ve lamented the lack of trailblazers, questioned the purpose of an audience and even called for an outright rebellion.  And now, amid all this white noise that passes for communication, we have yet another sign that independence in America is more discouraged than ever:

PittGirl just got fired.

If you’re not from Pittsburgh, you may not be familiar with PittGirl, the blogger who (until this week) posted anonymously hysterical rants and bittersweet observations about Pittsburgh for three years on her old site, The Burgh Blog.  Due to the increasing difficulty of maintaining her anonymity, PittGirl finally outed herself this week.  It turns out her name is actually Virginia Montanez, she’s 35, happily married and a mother of two.  She’d blogged anonymously because she was concerned that her comedic evisceration of local targets like mayor Luke Ravenstahl, UPMC, and Steelers Ben “Duke of Fug” Roethlisberger and Jeff “Skippy Skeeve” Reed might get her in trouble at work.

Turns out she was right.  One day after going public, Montanez was fired from her job as the Director of Marketing and Communications for NEED, a Pittsburgh-based scholarship program for minority students, where she’d served for the past 6 years.  (Amusingly, Montanez is still listed on NEED’s employee page at the time of this post.)

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because Montanez’s story so closely resembles that of Heather Armstrong (aka Dooce), who was also fired after posting sarcastic and unflattering anecdotes about her day job.*  (In fact, Montanez was technically “dooced,” according to popular web parlance.)  In the aftermath of her dismissal, Armstrong parlayed her considerable writing skills into a full-time career. PittGirl’s fans undoubtedly expect her to do the same; it’s not Montanez’s career options that worry me.

It’s that the paranoiacs were right.

Let’s ignore for the moment the fact that Armstrong and Montanez are each strong-willed, sharp-tongued women who were fired for daring to detail the idiosyncracies and idiocies of their daily lives.  Let’s also kid ourselves into believing that a man who’d done the exact same thing would have also been fired by his face-saving male superiors.  (Sexism would only muddy these waters, so let’s keep our paranoia clean.)

For me, the bigger issue is this: since when did America become a nation where holding a contrarian opinion is a fireable offense?

I understand the politics of always needing to appear positive, and I find them wearying and fraudulent.  That’s one of the many reasons I’m a freelancer; this way, I only have to kiss my own ass.  And yet, even my own sarcastic opinions and unpulled punches have allegedly cost me work, so I can only imagine how many people are lining up to not hire someone like Montanez for fear that she might eventually point out their flaws, or otherwise challenge their obsessively bubble-wrapped self-image.

When Montanez temporarily pulled the plug on PittGirl last year for fear that someone else might out her, I lamented the need for her anonymity in the first place.  When she decided to go public this week, I gave her credit for being resilient enough to withstand the impending slings and arrows she’d been fearing these three long years.  But now, realizing just how right she was to be paranoid, my respect for her has doubled, even as my respect for society in general continues to plummet ever downward.

* Correction: I originally wrote that Heather Armstrong blogged anonymously at Dooce.  I was wrong; she blogged in her own name.

Two years ago, I wrote an unusually profane and venomous post, even for me.  Buju, a dog I worked with at the Animal Rescue League in Pittsburgh, had been murdered by its adopter, who proceeded to cut off its paw and then attempted to decapitate it.  Having known this dog personally, the entire situation infuriated me beyond belief.  (Fortunately, I had plenty of commenters who reminded me it was “only a dog.”)

This week, the guy was sentenced to 5-10 years for a weapons charge related to the crime: because he was already on probation for federal gun charges, it was illegal for him to be in possession of the firearm he used to kill Buju.  The judge opted not to include any additional time for the animal cruelty charge, which in my mind is akin to admitting that it didn’t matter.

Thus, by that logic, it’s fair to say that in Pittsburgh you can shoot a dog in the torso, saw off its paw, try to saw off its head, give up halfway through and dump the whole mutilated body in a garbage bag and, as long as you legally own the gun you used to shoot it, everything’s all right.

Given that, I’m surprised the Steelers didn’t sign Michael Vick.

Yesterday, Twitter was abuzz with the news that Chicago-based Horizon Realty was suing one of its tenants for $50,000 over a single tweet (sent by that tenant to her audience of 20).  Regardless of what you think of the lawsuit’s claim*, here’s the really interesting part (from a social media POV):

• News of the lawsuit seems to have been first reported on Monday, July 27
• The story got picked up by Chicago-based Twitterers around 1 AM Tuesday, July 28
• By 11 AM Tuesday, social media-focused Twitterers had discovered the story
• By 3 PM Tuesday, “Horizon Realty” was a Trending Topic

In English, what this means is that a story which initially only affected one person became a “mainstream” (at least in terms of Twitter awareness) issue less than 24 hours after it happened.  Not bad for a story that doesn’t feature a dead celebrity.

Of course, this was also the perfect storm of Trending Topic-friendly content, in that it was:

• a story about an underdog being sued by a corporation
• in an American metropolis
• because of Twitter

In fact, I suspect that if the story had been picked up by Chicagoland tweeters around 8 AM (instead of 1 AM, when the bulk of the Twitter audience is drifting to sleep), it would have trended much earlier in the day.  That overnight lag delayed Horizon Realty’s momentary spike of ignominity.

The lesson?  Unless you’re a dead celebrity or a meaningless hashtag, your fastest way to become famous on Twitter is to sue someone *because* of Twitter.  (Or, more practically: it takes less than 24 hours for seemingly insignificant news items to become mainstream Twitter talking points, as long as social media is involved.)

* Side note: for my two cents on the actual Horizon Realty lawsuit, go here.