On Friday I received an email from my wife with the subject line “price,” a message of “February price” and an attachment called “price.zip”. A quick phone call confirmed that she didn’t send it. She didn’t send it again later that day.

On Saturday I received the same email from four other people. Intrigued, I Googled varients of the subject line, message and attachment. Nothing relevant. So I hit Technorati. There weren’t dozens of posts, but I did find one that led me to this post that discussed the bagle variant, along with characteristics, what it does to your system, and most importantly removal instructions.

Two lessons: One, the blogosphere is unmatched in staying up-to-date with buzz and breaking news when the news may not be of interest to the general public (or what Fox News and CNN deem to be of interest to the public, like Oscar nominations and high-speed televised car chases.)
Two, over the next few days those posts and ones like it will get a lot of traffic. What’s going on in or around your industry that you can blog about that’s going to capture a lot of searches? Blogging early about something of interest to your audience can be a great way of capturing the interest of new prospects.