Guardian Tsunami of Hate

I read quite a few blogs regularly using Firefox's RSS feed reader (don't worry Mum I'll show you how the next time I'm home) and I noticed over the weekend, at least 3 of them mentioned a particular article from the Guardian website which had had some 'viral' attention from the world's blog readers and commenters.
To summarise; Max, a 19 year old gap year student is going to blog his way round a 2 month trip to Thailand and Australia. Unfortunately, alongside his rather uninspired writing style, (Hi! I'm Max! I'm 19!) young Max happens to share a surname with one of the Guardian's travel hacks (daddy dearest) and once this fact was outed, this proliferated a set of comments so scathing and vitriolic, that you can actually forgive the blandness of the original article, for the entertainment value provided by the comments section. There are 500+ of them so take a bit of reading, but settle down with a cuppa and enjoy the frenzy.
You might think that the level of comment is OTT, and that it's slightly unfair to pick on the poor lad, but the problem lies with the fact that these people weren't commenting on someone's home-grown family blog, or travel diary, or informal witterings (as per this one!). This is a national newspaper, with people who are PAID to write! Expectations are high, and passing off someone's informal travel blog as a piece of quality journalism is just asking for trouble! Especially when your dad works for the firm!

Read and see for yourselves......The original blog article is here.

Needless to say, that wasn't the end of the story - the following day, the Editor published a response to the comments, and also, his father is quoted in a further response here.

Poor Max, whose only fault lay in a slightly slack opening article, landed in Mumbai over the weekend, and has decided against any form of journalism career!