I decided here to relate how I came to post the taserman story, what happened after that then some things I discovered later ...the reason is the extraordinary success this story got (at least for me) a success I didn't expect at all (below are the details) ..
I first saw the story on statcounter forum in a thread named ignore the naughty words..... it's too good not to share., it was pleasant (I mean great!) so I decided to post it here but unlike for my other posts, I did nothing to promote it on digg & similar places because it was not my work.
only yesterday I submited some of my links to boing boing, to be honest I've never heard of them before & didn't know it was that popular, but half an hour later ... "HOLY MOTHER ..WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION...@!@$$!%!@*!!!"
checking my statcounter stats I realized the traffic to my blog was soaring! 400 visitors then 1000, I looked for the place they were coming from & found it was this:
man zaps self with taser to test it, regrets doing so
by the end of yesterday according to statcounter, 6058 people had read the story! and the time I'm typing this 956 others added ... visitors are not coming from boing boing alone because now 10s of forums & blogs are linking to it, even a forum in french & another one in hebrew!!
what about the story itself?
1st of all I laughed when I saw boing boing article starting "Mumu bought a 100,000-volt pocket-sized taser as a gift for his wife ...", that's cool but fortunately I had specified it didn't happen to me ...
to have an idea about the age of story, the thread on statcounter forum was posted on 08-10-2006, then I found an older blog post (feb. 2006) when I tried to submit the story to digg (yes, after seeing the great success I couldn't resist, lol!) ... finally I read snopes article mentioned in brian comment below. ;) according to snopes, it has good chances to be an urban legend
quote:
Origins: This Stun gun story about a protective husband trying out his wife's taser upon himself to ascertain its ability to take out a mugger first appeared on the Internet in July 2004. For now its author is unknown to us, leaving the question of "But is it a true story?" up in the air.
This same narrative has landed in the snopes.com inbox numerous times, often altered by small textual differences, such as variations in the storyteller's name (Art, Earl, Tommy, J.J., Clem, Mike), his wife's name (Toni, Kelly, Gisele, Melanie, Gerry, Kathy), the anniversary (18th, 22nd, 30th, 36th, or just "our anniversary"), and even the name of the shop where the item was purchased (Larry's Pistol and Pawn [with or without the "Shop"] or Ski's Pistol and Pawn Shop). In some e-mails the yarn is augmented by one of two endings ... followed by the closing salutation of "Still in shock," a simultaneous use of the literal and figurative ...
I would also mention some of things I came to find, some serious articles or discussions starting around taserman story:
whose logic? which rationality? on acma's random thought site
when criminals will start using tasers on global affairs forum
also this article on a women got tasered by the police:
woman gets tasered on hiredmonkey
back to the my post & the readers it got, I'm just amazed how many times success is all about luck, you may work hard for something but get rewarded for something else you did just for fun, although I agree taserman story is obviously better than my other entries ...
what's crazy too is the traffic a site like boing boing gets, if they sent me over 6000 readers in few hours, how many visitors they have?!
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