Poof! Smear Blogger Disappears
What a wuss. The blogger aiming to smear Al Diguido, the president of e-mail service provider Epsilon Interactive, last week disappeared as mysteriously as he appeared.
Was he threatened? Did he just get tired? Did he get a nasty case of lawyer-caused cease-and-desist-itis?
Alas, we’ll probably never know. After crowing for two weeks like few have crowed in e-mail marketing, the anonymous blogger has disappeared without so much as a whimper.
As of last week, attempts to call up the blog, which was located at http://kingofemailmarketing.blogspot.com/, result in an error message.
The blog contained all of three posts, and one comment before it was quietly pulled.
Repeated messages to the e-mail address the blogger used to communicate with the press have gone unanswered.
Epsilon Interactive is also silent on the issue.
During its short life, the blog had the e-mail industry buzzing over who its author might have been. And not everyone thought the blog was bad for DiGuido. One e-mail executive working for a competitor to Epsilon said: “We should be so lucky as to have a lunatic write a blog about one of us.”
Now the blogger’s disappearance has executives speculating about what frightened him off so quickly. “He dipped his toe in the water, got scared and ran for the shore,” said another e-mail industry executive, who asked to remain anonymous.
The blogger launched his effort early this month and announced it in an e-mail to Magilla Marketing and three other trade editors. The blogger pretended to be DiGuido writing under the pseudonym Pal Dodido bragging about becoming the King of E-mail Marketing. He described duping venture capitalists into buying into what is assumed to be Bigfoot Interactive, and duping analysts at Forrester and Jupiter into giving the e-mail service provider a high ranking.
In an e-mail exchange with Magilla Marketing, the blogger said he never worked with DiGuido and that he was being fed material by people in the industry.
