Max Gogarty and the insincere blog?

Late last week, a 19 year old guy started to write his blog, the subject was on his travels to India and Thailand and as he says is will be a report on ‘partying’ and ‘finding himself’…

Normally a blog like this would have been dismissed but this blog was special as it was on the Guardian newspaper website and the man in question is Max Gogarty.

When he posted his first entry it was greeted by a mass of negative, hateful and envious comments. Within 24 hours over 470 comments were posted and practically all of them were negative, as well as that a couple of Facebook groups also appeared and several other blogs have covered the story as well offering their own insults and comment threads to vent frustration.

This is due to Max being the son of the travel writer Paul Gogarty who worked for the guardian occasionally, because of his ‘middle class’ demeanour and because the Channel 4 show skins came up in the text it was seen as a cheap plug.

The people who commented assumed that he was sneaked in through the back door and that the post itself was clichéd and not up to standard. At the problem’s peak, other news siteswere reporting account of this, saying words like 'class hate' and 'cyber bullying'.

A point that has been overlooked so far is that this blog grabbed attention, in such a small amount of time this was spread around the net with probably thousands of people looking at it from all directions.

(see the blogpulse graph for Max Gogarty)

The blog was not special, and was one of many thousands of new blogs started every day. What made it different was the perceived insincerity of the content, and the endorsemet of the Guardian.

I doubt Max will continue his blog but if he decided to brave the abuse in time this blog could have a serious following and maybe even reach cult status, just as long as he is fine with being infamous instead of famous.