I made you a chart…

It’s been said that it takes an average of 10 years to become an overnight sensation. So by that measure I’m 8 years ahead of schedule.

Two years ago, I wrote an article, and I was kind of shy about promoting said article because most of the reason I blog is… well, here, I’ll illustrate it with a chart too:

Anyway, one day when a conversation came up in the SL Business forum in which a new person asked for some advice, I figured, hell, maybe she would find the article useful. So, I linked to it. Other posters really really liked it and it even ended up linked via the SL Wiki. Not bad! And, largely because of the links from the forum and the links from the Wiki, it’s pretty much the most read article in my whole blog. It even finally beat out the outdated listing for houppelandes (a mystery which eludes me to this day).

Well, being curious, I followed some of my incoming traffic links and found a discussion on the forums– about my blog post! Knock me over with a feather. But the part that really surprised me the most was the fact that one person was, I can’t make this shit up, honest-to-goodness offended.

By what? Bad grammar? Inaccurate or false claims? Product placement? No, she was offended because the article contained what I’ll lovingly call Graph 3:

This chart was made by Prad Prathivi, also two years ago. Underneath where the graph is posted, in my article, are the following words:

The graph may have been intended as a parody, but it’s still not that far off from the truth. You can hype the hell out of your product, get people through the doors in droves, but if your product isn’t good it won’t stay.

Now, having read that, is anyone here in question about the intent of the graph? Apparently, the forum poster still was, even though another poster said (in not so many words) “Um, dude. Parody.” And yet it still wasn’t enough to get the offended party to stop clutching her pearls.

So, I don’t know, maybe someone will read this, maybe nobody will, but I’m going to reiterate what I said at the forums (and have even said here before):