Did Boing Boing have the last laugh?

Well since Virgin America has announced their airline name winners, it is time to decide who's name is the best.

Boing Boing contributed a couple of great names like "Unicorn Chaser" and "Chic Mobile."

Here are the other winners:

• Airplane 2.0
• Fog Cutter
• Jane
• Mach Daddy
• Virgin & Tonic
• Winner of Naming Contest

I think who ever submitted "Winner of the Naming Contest" had the last laugh. But BoingBoing wins the prize by partnering with Virgin for a joint press release and cementing its place a a high profile member of the new media. Congrats Boing Boing!

Look out below, the FUD abounds ...

The battle for the virtual server throne is on. A few days ago searchservervirtualization.com posed the question, who is using Microsoft's solution? Open-source challenger, Xen has tons of benchmarks about the performance of their hypervisor. And this week a user fires back singing the praises of Microsoft's Virtual Server. Scrolling through the comments, it only took 3 before a VMWare fan piped in about FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt), chastising the user's story praising Microsoft. In the war of the Virtual Servers, we are still in the early goings, but as with all tech battles, the challenger, the incumbent or the fans accuse the other of defending their market position with BS to throw off the marketplace and prospective customers.

Let's do a quick web search to get a handle on how prevalent these FUD accusations are. I did a search for a few top of mind tech companies, and a general search for the term.
FUD: 5.65M
Apple and FUD: 1.25M
Apple and FUD without Microsoft: 189,000
VMware and FUD: 662,000
Microsoft and FUD: 1.37M
Sun and FUD: 1.25M
Sun and FUD without Microsoft, Oracle or Apple: 633,000
Oracle and FUD: 956,000
EMC and FUD: 131,000
Blog Search for FUD: 833,888
Blog Search for FUD without Oracle, Sun, Microsoft and Apple: 28,757

Looks like Microsoft, Sun, Apple, and Oracle account for about 2/3 of the web references to FUD. Interestingly enough 97% of blog references to FUD include references to one of these four companies. You'll also note these organizations have some of the most famous, and infamous Silicon Valley CEOs. Coincidence? I think not.

Here's the moral: increasing your 'thought leadership' or blog comments only requires a quick mention of FUD.