One has to respect Andrew Baron – he’s the founder of Rocketboom, a highly entertaining and popular videoblog that really pioneered the entire genre that we see before us today.
We reported earlier this week that Andrew had put his Twitter account up for sale on ebay – an action that garnered him significant attention around the blogosphere – most of it noise rising in righteous indignation for daring to sell this account. Some even called it an “insult to his followers” to do so.
Baron posted last night on Twitter that he was canceling the eBay auction – he had this to say in an article on Cnet earlier today:
In an interview Thursday morning, Baron explained his rationale behind the decision to take down the auction.
Essentially, he said, a fellow Twitterer wrote him suggesting that the people who were bidding the eBay auction well into four figures were “all spam marketers, people who will do anything just to get their name out there, people who don’t understand Web 2.0 and blogging.”
“I already knew,” Baron said, “there would be a great range of different types of (possible) outcomes. But I believed that I would be able to manage the outcome by trying to make a positive outcome for the buyer, for my friends and followers. Even if it wasn’t a good fit, I (believed) I could work with them. But after I heard that they were all just spam marketers, that just kind of killed it for me and I didn’t want to risk that.”
Umm, ok. What did he think was going to happen?
Perhaps he thought, as Duncan Riley notes:
WTF did he think would happen? that some utopian hippy would buy the account and spread peace and goodwill to his followers?
Personally, I wonder if this was an actual attempt to sell the account – or was this some sort of way to garner attention as a part of a marketing plan?
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