Blog History
The blog diary was first launched in summer of 2004 and seemed to grow overnight. Hours after the first "diary entry" a random post appeared on the IMDb Quentin Tarantino message board, started by a fan claiming to have met Quentin in a book store in California. The fan claimed that Tarantino gave him the web address for his new blog, which was http://qtdiary.blogspot.com — Internet Archive'd copy.
The thread on the forum generated a massive number of responses and by a week later QT's Diary had attracted over a million visitors and readers including Roger Avary (who posted about its validity in his own blog website), numerous journalists, Quentin Tarantino's publicist Bumble Ward and, ultimately, via web print-outs, Quentin himself.
Tarantino gave his blessing to the project and told his publicist that he enjoyed it very much - he thought it was "funny." Meanwhile some fans were not so thrilled. After the initial shock of the blog came the maelstrom of backlash.
Reporters for websites and magazines began to debunk the blog. On film website JoBlo, Berge Garabedian claimed "...we have contacted Bumble Ward and she assures us the blog is a hoax."
Meanwhile, Mrs. Ward enjoyed the blog immensely, claiming, “I've been recommending it to everyone... it’s a fake. The guy is doing a great job though, don’t you think? And truly, I’d hate to ruin his fun. But it’s fake. Quentin hardly knows what a mouse is.”
Soon, "Quentin" grew tired of battling his critics so he turned the blog into a surrealistic crime-drama in which a mobster, a President and a hacker all made guest appearances. This lively injection of humor and blatant originality made the page views soar again.
In November, the blog's fictional hacker known as "The Weasel" struck again and deleted the entire blog (but not the Blogger.com account). A message read: "THIS BLOG HAS BEEN HACKED BY THE WEASEL!" A week later the message was gone and the blog was permanently off-line (the account presumably deleted or removed by Blogger). A week after that, a new blog had taken its place - a wacky one-page gardening blog. However, it soon became apparent that it was just an early form of "viral" storytelling.
Read more about this topic: QT's Diary
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)