I have a blog on Posterous, a very interesting and agile Web service. Just now I received an apologetic email from the company’s CEO, Sachin Agarwal. He says that over the last six days, Posterous has been victimized by powerful Denial of Service Attacks. When the first one hit, last Wednesday, the Posterous team raced to move to new data centers. Another one hit on Friday. It was a crazy six days for Posterous. A tech leader named Vince, Agerwal writes, …quot;worked like a mad man until he passed out on his desk….quot;
Briefly, in 2002/03, I was acting info tech editor at BusinessWeek. If this were a Thursday night back then, I’d be preparing for Friday’s story meeting, in which I’d propose a 4-column narrative on the Posterous attacks. Here’s a very innovative and popular start-up, I’d argue, whose very existence was threatened by these attacks. (I still don’t know where they came from.) It would make a great story. It would give us insights into the dangers surrounding us and a look at a start-up battling them.
But why, another editor would surely ask, should we care about Posterous? (Of course, if the editor in chief appeared to be interested in my story, that question might remain unasked. These meetings were exercises in Kremlinology.) In any case, I’d have to make a case for Posterous. Still, I hope someone somewhere is considering writing a story about it. I’m far too busy with my book to report the story. But it’s one I’d like to read.
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You might be wondering about my blog on Posterous. I started a BusinessWeek alumni network on Ning. When Ning demanded payment for what started out as a free site, I migrated all of the content to Posterous. I look at it not as an active blog, but as a private archive of BusinessWeek history.
