Got hit by the SlideShare April Fool’s joke today that I’ve become a RockStar because one of my presentations has been getting a ton of views in the past 24 hours. I went into my account and, indeed, the Beyond Bootstrapping presentation I did for an Amazon Web Services event in NYC 18mos ago has over 100,000 views.I didn’t think it was a joke until someone pointed it out to me. Subtly changing some data on an otherwise legit web page is not cool.
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Turns out a lot of ppl are getting the same email and it’s frustrating a lot of people.
http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/2009/04/slidefail-making-fun-of-yourself-ok-getting-your-users-to-embarrass-themselves-in-front-of-their-own-networks-not-cool.html
So here is the interesting part–they are saying my preso got 100,000 views. So their April’s Fool joke involved subtly mis-representing data on their site. Not cool at all.
I found this from their blog:
http://blog.slideshare.net/2009/04/01/happy-april-fools-day/
I agree with you that the misrepresentation of data isn’t so much of a joke.
I agree Sim… it smacked of desperation, too, trying to get everyone to promote SlideShare using this faked data.
April Fool? Maybe but its more like the Village Idiot. Stupid? Yes. Dangerous? – well as Emerson said ‘I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.”
I think the prank was perfectly crafted to appeal to somebody who’s large ego is stroked by the idea that everybody is craving to look at their powerpoints. And you all fell for it. Here’s one definition of a successful prank: Exposing the pompous and the self-important.
We’re sorry if we upset you and caused trouble for you on April 1st. We reverted back to the real view count later on in the day. We weren’t trying to pull a marketing gimmick, just trying to be funny. And we’re not, sadly.
Check out PPTshare. It’s the anti- slideshare. For presentations with real ROI attached to them — sales, training, etc. It’s private, secure sharing where only the sender knows who viewed the file, and when they viewed it.