It’s Porn Day on YouTube!

God, this is the kind of story that just makes me smile. According to ArsTechnica:

Today, May 20, has been deemed “Porn Day” by denizens of 4chan and eBaum’s World, with an organized group of users from the sites uploading video clips of explicit, adult content en masse in an attempt to overwhelm the search results. In actuality, it appears that content was prematurely uploaded on the afternoon of the 19th. YouTube has already taken some steps to fight back, but it’s disturbingly easy to find stuff you really don’t want to see, and the uploaders are changing tactics.

These sorts of mass DDoS‘esque attacks are becoming a common thing in the hyper-connected digital age.  It is now easier than ever to raise a mob (angry or otherwise) to do your bidding, especially if your bidding has a fun, subversive edge – think “No-Pants Subway Day” for instance.

I wrote about a few other versions of this DDoS-style vigilantism here.

Cuil Fails At Naming Itself. Preview of their Future Failure.

There is an overwhelming amount of press today about the new search engine cuil.com.

So far, I have learned that is was started by ex-Googlers and that it is pronouced “cool.”

Yes, nearly everyone is saying there is no way they can beat Google or even come close to competing in the search market for all sorts of technical reasons but I have yet to see anyone come right out and tell it like it is:

It will fail because nobody can pronounce it.  And when you finally learn how they would like you to pronouce their madeup word you feel like punching them in the face.

I never liked the whole “drop a vowel” school of web 2.0 site naming (fickr, et. al.) but this whole make up a word and make it sound like a word we already have is truly ridiculous.

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