window office

Evil Marketing Ploy or April Fools Joke? ('cause it can't be true)

Just got an email from SlideShare entitled “You’re a SlideShare Rockstar”:

We’ve noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job … you must be doing something right. ;-)

And when I log into my account I see that one of my presentations has garnered more than 80,000 views:

Wow!  People must be *really* into blog search!  Er…. really?

A search for [blog feed search] retrieves this presentation with a much more reasonable view count:

Judging by the doctored view counts on my other slideshows, it appears that they’ve added 1 to the count and inserted ‘000’ after the first digit when viewing the listing from your “my presentations” page.  So, what is this?  A clever April Fools joke?  Or an evil marketing ploy?

(Apparently, Tumblr now allows you to “answer” my “questions” in this post. )