Not Sure What to Call this One so Let's Just call it "Sorry"

On Sunday I wrote my blog. Nothing unusual about that: I've been writing every Sunday for months now.

Except this one turned out to be different. It was to be my first ever Huffington Post submission.

"Write about something topical" they suggested. But as a writer on business related topics, that's not always so easy.

News that Amy Winehouse had just died on the Saturday was prevalent. A terrible tragedy of a talented life cut cruelly short. Forgive me, but I really do see a certain symmetry here with small business owners, many of whom fail to succeed for a multitude of different reasons.

So that became the topic of my blog. Big mistake.

Within minutes of being published on the Huffington Post, my blog started to attract comments - most of them negative.

Within hours, my blog was being blogged about.

In less than a day, other bloggers had started to blog about me and my blog post. I note, in this world of uncensored journalism that not one of them contacted me for a quick interview.

I apologised online for any offence I had caused. Still it didn't seem to  make any difference.

In a public pillorying reserved usually for just the rich, famous and political, I got the equivalent of an online roasting.

Then some of the criticism turned personal. Idiot. Bigot. Narcissist. Reprehensible. Insensitive. The list, regrettably, goes on.

In a McCarthy-esque turn of events, people began to hunt me down. Huffington Post didn't publish their comments so they turned to Twitter to harass me. Others got to me on facebook. Some tried other routes.

So here's the deal (without trying to sound too much like Bill Clinton in my defence):

I did NOT mean to offend anybody. I did see the analogy. I'll take on board the points about sharpening up my writing. And I appreciate that many will have found the content to have been in bad taste. For that I am truly sorry.

I did NOT write my blog as a deliberate link bait. I wrote it because I write about business and, as a Huffington Post submission, it was recommended that is was topical. Inadvertently I seem to have seem to have "link baited"  - a terms I didn't even know until Sunday night. It was never my intention. Who would want attention like this anyway?

I DID protect my tweets and my facebook pages. And I make no apology for that. These pages are mine to protect.

I DID initially try to respond to people's comments individually. However when things turned nasty, and I hope you'll forgive me, I decided it was better not to engage in further conversation. Tasteless blog or not. Bullying of any kind, on or offline, is unacceptable. And bullying includes name calling.

And finally, without wanting to sound too cynical here, the Huffington Post small business section is a relatively new area of their site. Most of the other articles, from what I can see, have less traffic, less interaction and less standing in google.

Which really does leave me wondering if I was, naively, the bait.