Blogosphere news. Seth Godin, internet marketing mastermind, coordinates one of the biggest stunts the blogosphere has ever seen. In Seth's words, it was remarkable. Motivated by Jeffrey Henning's influential article, "The Blogging Iceberg", Seth Godin gathered loyal blog followers on a barge financed by buddies at the venture capital firm Flatiron Partners. SAP Ventures also participated in the deal/stunt as Jeff Nolan convinced German headquarters to "loosen up a bit". In any case, the barge appeared in New York City Harbour towing a giant iceberg. Corporate bloggers always in the know (like Om Malik, Steve Rubel, Dave Sifry, and Scott Raefer [the last two 'cause they're watching all the blogs with their fancy proprietary databases - not because they're smart or anything]) were expecting it, but most said Seth's stunt was lame. Seth Godin, an adventurer and millionaire businessman (that he obtained via click fraud schemes before it "became cool"), had been promoting his scheme to tow a blogging iceberg from antarctica for quite some time using subliminal blog messaging techniques conceived by Microsoft's uber blogger Robert Scoble and encoded in the byzantine structures of del.icio.us page views. Who would have ever thought Robert would have a good idea? He just posts a lot of boring stuff. Anyway, Seth had apparently succeeded using Robert's techniques. Seth said that he was going to carve the berg into small ice cubes and attach leftover prophylactic noses from his latest book promotion deal, which he would sell to the public for ten cents each. These well-traveled cubes, fresh from the pure waters of Antarctica, were promised to improve the flavor of any "Purple Cow" milk they cooled. Slowly the iceberg made its way into the harbor. Bloggers provided exciting blow-by-blow coverage of the scene with Flickr photos and MP3 podcasts of the cheering bloggers and waves smashing against the shore. Tom Peters was on the scene, but the only words he could get out of his mouth were the repeated words "wow ... wow ... wow ... Seth, I've finally found it ...". Only when the berg was well into the harbor was Seth's secret revealed. It started to rain, and the firefighting foam and shaving cream that the berg was really made of washed away, uncovering the white plastic sheets beneath and the #17 scam it really was.

Steve Shu