Local News Story Gets National Attention on the Web

Channel 27 (WKOW) did a story about a girl who bought a computer not knowing that it was running Ubuntu instead of Windows. It apparently caused her so much trouble that she had to quit school.

The news story quickly circulated the Web since there are a lot of Ubuntu users out there who wanted to defend their operating system. Since a lot of these users surf the Internet a lot and since the story was put on Digg.com (the perfect audience for that kind of story), Channel 27 got a lot of web traffic about it. Here is their news story with a note about how much traffic they got:

27 News Troubleshooter: Woman blames Dell for missing online classes

27 News broadcast an update to this story on Thursday after more than 130,000 people read the story online. We received hundreds of viewer emails, phone calls, and web comments.

They capitalized on this traffic and also posted a follow up story.

So good for them. I'm sure this was unexpected but they had to be pleasantly surprised. This will happen once in a while. You pick the right topic and by the magic of social networking (Digg.com), the article is put in front of the right audience.

Here are more related links:

• UPDATE: Thousands of viewer comments, phone calls about Ubuntu computer story
• College Girl Drops Out of School Because of… Ubuntu?
• Update Girl drops out of college because of Linux
• Ubuntu Operating System Makes Girl Drop Out of College
• Update Girl drops out of college because of Linux
• Ubuntu Causes Girl To Drop Out of College
• Ubuntu Causes Girl To Drop Out of College
• Girl drops out of college because of Ubuntu Dell Laptop. HA!
• Linux saga: Girl drops out of school over Ubuntu

And the list goes on. So, wow - the story really got around!

Somehow she's being called "Update Girl" for some reason - probably because they had the word "UPDATE" in the original story and someone just copied that in - so that's kinds of funny.

So keep blogging and publising stories on the web. Chances are, something will spread like fire once in a while!

-Tony