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At approximately 11:15pm Monday, March 27, 2006 something horrible happened. Somehow, Google accidently deleted its blog, and loyal readers began to get 404 errors (page not found). In an attempt to protect Google's reputation from users with malicious intent, Trey Philips - a college student at my university, the University of Texas - registered the blog and held the fort until Google was able to recover. Reports of hacking quickly spread on the sensationalized Digg.com while I stood by, loyally recording this piece of history (while real journalists slept). This is the story.
I use the term "hack" here liberally. As you can tell by the short time from writing the digg article, to its front page debut - using buzzwords makes people read. So what if the word is a little inaccurate? I'll get some extra readers to my article. Consider this a satire on the media as a whole. Maybe next time you read a sensationalized aritcle, you'll think twice. What actually happened was more like an obvious reactionary event to something silly someone at Google did. They deleted their blog (whether by accident or by bug, I do not know).
The Google Blog is very popular, so when this happened, many people began seeing the 404 error. As he said in the replacement blog, Trey was simply trying to hold the fort down til Google could restore the real blog. He did not break any user agreements.
In retrospect, I believe Google may wish to include some sort of "Do you really want to delete your blog?" dialogue like we find in so many other applications. Maybe next time this will save them from some short pain.
The name Trey Philips was NOT chosen out of nowhere, unlike what some are lead to believe by the conversation posted here. Trey is an actual person attending my school. You can visit his website at lazykarma.com. He has his own account there. The conversation posted on this site is meant for purely entertainment value. If you don't find it entertaining, I'm sorry. In that case, please spam me with flame about how horrible my english is.