Online readers are in a tizzy over 90 Day Jane, a blogger who claims she will commit suicide soon and is tracking it on the Web as “simply a public record.” She started the blog last week and now supposedly has 83 days left in her planned 90-day crusade “to do the deed” and kill herself. She says she’s not doing this to get any attention — yet in less than a week someone has publicized her blog to the point where everyone is talking about it, from Gawker to, well, me.

A carefully posed author’s photo of the blogger behind 90 Day Jane.

Pardon me for being cynical, but my first thought when my colleague Michael Rand emailed me about 90 Day Jane was, “I wonder what upcoming movie or other media she is promoting.” The blog seems too slick (catchy title) and has become popular too quickly to seem real — right down to her pleasant reminder that she has set up an alternate domain name to the blog, 90dayjane.com, just in case “blogspot takes this down before i’m gone.” Riiight.

It all reminds me of That Girl Emily, which I wrote about in July 2006:

The Web was abuzz this week with incredulous postings about a new blog in which the writer, Emily, is detailing her crusade to exact revenge on her cheating husband, Steven. Juicy! It wasn’t long, though, before many people figured out that they have been duped again by an Internet-based viral marketing campaign.

thatgirlemily.blogspot.com
Emily was a happily married real-estate agent working through uncertainties in her life by writing a blog, That Girl Emily, at the suggestion of her best friend, Laura. Her promptly filed posts – marked by perfect grammar and an occasional potty mouth - read like a book, with continual references to her wonderful guy, Steven. It wasn’t long, though, before Emily discovered that Steve was cheating on her with Laura. Emily detailed all of this in her daily blog entries and then pledged “14 Days of WRATH!” to get her revenge on Steven: “Because I’ve decided that 14 days is precisely the amount of time I’ll still devote to that faithless and deceitful husband before I wash my hands of him completely.” She started by placing a derogatory billboard ad - ostensibly conceived, designed and erected in just a day over a weekend - for Steven to see each day on his way to work in New York City. The same billboard appeared in Los Angeles. That Steve really does get around.

www.atleastihavechicken.com/whatiswillthinking
In his blog, Will Thompson details things in Emily’s carefully chronicled adventures that tip off its nature as viral marketing – covert advertising using sensational subject matter that spreads from person to person, or website to website. For example, That Girl Emily has no author profile and comments are not allowed, lest anyone suggest that her blog is a fake. Emily’s blog also has a hidden counter at the bottom of the page to track traffic. It all reeks of a viral marketing campaign. What’s Emily pitching, and who’s behind her? It’s not known at this writing – some have suggested a CourtTV program – but Thompson probably will have the details when it breaks.

It turned out that Emily was indeed just a front to promote a Court TV show about a private investigator who follows cheating spouses. Hey, and she used Blogspot, too. 90 Day Jane hasn’t disabled her comments, many of which seem to be requests for her to pose naked online — you know, since she’s going to kill herself anyway — but there sure seems to be a hidden agenda to this far-fetched suicide threat.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.