Be careful what you say: you might trigger a Google Alert.

Eric had the temerity last week to gripe on his blog about a certain open source business in­tel­li­gence product, and got swarmed by irate defenders. Apparently he showed up in their Google Alerts. Some of the posters were helpful, but the ad hominem attackers were more en­ter­tain­ing:

Your blog has had 22 posts in the past year, and your blogroll includes absolutely no one of note in the open source world. So I think it’s safe to say that while you are pointing out a perception that they should address in some way, that your opinion isn’t worth much.

I’m in his blogroll, but I’ll stipulate that I’m not of note, despite my reach. On the other hand, Ben Collins-Sussman and Karl Fogel are two of the primary Subversion developers and Subversion is the VCS for thousands of open source projects.

I mentioned Raymond C’s enormous blog post queue in yesterday’s post. I triggered a Google Alert: he emailed me this morning to say that the queue was up to 16 months! <boggle/>