scottmerrickdotnet: funny

Thursday, December 04, 2014

Have a Scott Christmas

with music from the folk music past of yours truly. I share these tunes annually, and this year I've decided to do so using SoundCloud, a fabulous music sharing platform I often browse to hear new music, especially that of friends I respect and admire.

So, here. Have fun and don't let the sticks and coal get ya down:

https://soundcloud.com/groups/have-a-scott-christmas

Thursday, April 02, 2009

Ah SlideShare--GOT ME!

(crosspost from Oh!VirtualLearning!)I got an email from SlideShare.com yesterday that read:
Hi scottmerrick,

We've noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of
views in the last 24 hours. Great job ... you must be doing something right.
;-)
Why don't you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we
can track the conversation.
Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team

When I visited the slideshare site to check my view count, I was amazed to see that it had garnered over 20,000 views in less than a month! Wow! I of course got all excited and emailed my Vanderbilt CSO team the great news that my Second Life slidecast, the entire 45 minute online version of my presentation "Why Second Life" had become famous!

Then this morning I visited SlideShare again to find my view count had been reset to its actual (and still moderately impressive, I'd submit) 246. What happened? Ah, I thought, googling "slideshare april fools." The result?

Happy April Fools day
Apr 1, 06:12 am PST
We celebrated April Fools Day with a little prank: views on your presentations have an extra two zeros on them. We hope you find this funny. Your views will be rolled back to normal in a few hours.
You can see tweets about this prank on twitter …
we asked people to mark their tweets with #bestofslideshare
in an email we sent out. We sincerely apologize if we annoyed you … we notice from the reactions on twitter that some people are not amused.
Update: We’ve always loved our users and will continue to do so in future,
the joke notwithstanding. If our prank upset you, we’re sorry.
Update Again: Actual view counts have now been restored. Its all over and back to normal!

Funny! Excepting, of course, for my having to pump out another email to my group apologizing for my gullibility. Ah, well, good job SlideShare!