Lauren Turner was but a simple marketing peon who sold ads for Google until Michael Moore's documentary Sicko hit theaters, giving her what we're sure she thought was a brilliant new way to sell ads. She published a post on an official Google blog encouraging HMOs to buy anti-Moore Google Ads (ads presumably reading, "The health-care system is fine!") whenever someone Googled "Sicko."
Under the headline "Does negative press make you Sicko?" Turner's blog post argued that "Moore attacks health insurers, health providers and pharmaceutical companies by connecting them to isolated and emotional stories of the system at its worst." Her attempt to sell ads by portraying Moore's subjects as "isolated and emotional" created an explosion of blowback both in the print media and other blogs. Turner was forced to issue a public apology and emphasize that her opinions did not reflect Google's.
29. "What to Expect When You're Aborting"
She's gleefully blogging the countdown to her abortion, and she's nicknamed her fetus "the tumor." Though there's nowhere to leave feedback, there is an email address, and she swears she's received mostly supportive comments. We're tempted to call shenanigans on this whole blog, but if it's real, it's kind of amazing. And by amazing, we mean horrifying. We're pro-choice, but on this, we're conflicted. And if you're not, you're surer of your ideals than we are.
28. "WOW, You're a MORON!" 3/22/08
Most personal blogs are relatively mindless accounts of what their owners ate for breakfast. This guy used his to bypass the Philadelphia police force and get back his stolen Xbox.
27. "Nightmare Online Dater John Fitzgerald Page Is The Worst Person In The World" 10/11/07
There have been a couple of online-personals encounters so horrifying that the Gawker Media empire actually got wind of them and turned them into blog fodder. John Fitzgerald is the best example of this — this post blew up to the point that Fitzgerald was actually voted one of Atlanta's "Least Influential People" by the city's alt-weekly.
26. "What's so bad about 'sweetie,' anyway?" 5/16/08
After Barack Obama was caught calling a female reporter "sweetie" on camera, the right-wing began milking the gaffe for all it was worth, turning it into an anti-Obama shitstorm. In a surprising blog post torn between her allegiance to both feminism and liberalism, Salon's Rebecca Traister argued for more — not less — media coverage of just this type of YouTube-propelled gaffe.
"It's tempting, especially as a woman, especially as a strong woman, like Diane Sawyer, to establish that caring too much about a small thing like 'sweetie' is lily-livered, feminine, weak," she writes. Says Traister's editor (and former Hooksexup blogger) Sarah Hepola: "I think people felt like the media was making too much of Obama's 'sweetie' comment, but Rebecca does a beautiful job of articulating just why we should care about that kind of verbal nuance. As she writes: 'Just because a small exchange doesn't mean everything, we don't have to pretend that it doesn't mean anything.'"
25. "My Favorite Graphs...and the future" 4/2/2007
You are of course familiar with John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad. Never has this theory been better illustrated than in the senseless undoing of well-known technology blogger Kathy Sierra. Anonymous trolls targeted her innocuous blog seemingly at random (though her gender was probably part of it), posting hundreds of death threats, slurs and Photoshopped images of Sierra, eventually driving her to shut down her site entirely, to the dismay of her fan base.
24. "Quote of the Day" 7/13/08
We love that one of the most commented-on posts ever published on Perez Hilton was about this arid quote from McCain: "I think that we've proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no, I don't believe in gay adoption." Going on a thousand comments, his celeb-obsessed readership finds its righteous political indignation and fires off a collective "Fuck off, old man!" Who says Perez's followers are philistines?
23. "Damn, I am so busted, yo" 8/5/07
In 2007, the technology world was abuzz about a blogger who posted under the guise of Apple founder Steve Jobs. The blogger was open about the fact that he wasn't really Jobs; nevertheless, his great sense of humor and general outrageousness ("I'm on the Master Cleanse!") got him plenty of attention. He was finally outed as Forbes editor Daniel Lyons on August 5 by a sleuthing New York Times reporter. This is his "farewell" post, though he continued to blog even after his identity was revealed.
promotion
22. "Because I couldn't say it on the phone" 12/13/07
Even today, with prescription-drug commercials wedged between ads for iPhones and skin creams, the subject of psychopharmacology remains as sticky as ever, especially for women. Heather Armstrong, the writer of the wildly popular parenting blog, Dooce, has written posts that received lots of comments before, but this one about post-partum depression hit a Hooksexup in a way few blogs ever manage to do.
"In the last couple of months I've watched several people around me suffer needlessly because they were either too afraid or too arrogant to take care of their mental health," she wrote, saying that she hoped this post would make readers "feel a little less embarrassed about getting help." Apparently it worked: Several of the 1,100+ commenters said the post single-handedly convinced them to get to a doctor.
21. "Megan Had It Coming" 12/9/07
The "Megan Had It Coming" blog recently made news again when Jason Fortuny of the infamous "Craigslist Experiment" told the New York Times Magazine that he — not Lori Drew — was the blogger behind it. You're probably familiar with the backstory: fourteen-year-old Megan Meier hung herself in 2006 after being cyber-bullied by a person who she thought was a sixteen-year-old boy, but was actually her friend's mother, Lori Drew. Internet troll Fortuny then posed as Drew, starting up the Megan Had It Coming blog, which caused Meier's still-grieving family even more distress. Amazingly, the Megan Had It Coming blog still exists — it's most recent post was published last March.
30. "Does negative press make you Sicko?" 6/29/07
29. "What to Expect When You're Aborting"
28. "WOW, You're a MORON!" 3/22/08
27. "Nightmare Online Dater John Fitzgerald Page Is The Worst Person In The World" 10/11/07
26. "What's so bad about 'sweetie,' anyway?" 5/16/08
25. "My Favorite Graphs...and the future" 4/2/2007
24. "Quote of the Day" 7/13/08
23. "Damn, I am so busted, yo" 8/5/07
21. "Megan Had It Coming" 12/9/07
