For anyone who is wondering, this is John Gruber. John is the author behind Daring Fireball, a blog that I read almost religiously in Google Reader multiple times a day. John is very vocal with opinion and has an uncanny ability of being right more often than not. And when he is wrong or way off base he’ll pull a David Letterman or Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear which makes him even more likable.
That should have been my first clue as to what would happen when I downloaded this pic of him and edited it up a bit with the “You Look Nice Today” strap line. In my head it was rather funny to see John holding a cardboard sign from his podcasting buddies and fellow Twitterers @hotdogsladies, @lonelysandwich and @scottsimpson. I was counting on a good laugh with the fellow Fat Dads and maybe a comment or two on the Flickr feed. What I didn’t see coming was the wave of other photographers, bloggers and web socialites 
playing along and making as many of their own versions as they did. As I refreshed my own browser to read new cardboard mantra, I was increasing the views of others pics as was everyone else doing the same. That’s when it hit me, my stats should be pretty good on this… Good! They were great! Awesome. In fact too good. This was not even a pic that I took, my original most viewed ever shot only had 306 views, this “John Gruber YLNT” free promo banner surpassed this in 45 minutes flat. And by the time I hit publish it will certainly have surpassed 700 (681 as of 15:50).
The one thing that hit me was the how the Internet has really become the NOW medium. It always has been a NOW place, but you’ll never really know how much so until you’re site goes down because of a DIGG effect or Leo laporte mentions it on TWiT or MacBreak Weekly. Today I got a small taste of this and would just like to thank John Gruber and the You Look Nice Today crew for the excellent material to work with.
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