Back is Beautiful. Or, Simply, Thank you

As you may have noticed, I was suspended from twitter from late Tuesday to pretty much all of Wednesday for two days starting September 23rd, (2009) .  I am still to receive a reason why I was suspended, and it would be interesting to know why/how I trip the filter. Full explanation of the Twitter ban is found here.

However the real story was the search community support! To be honest I still don’t have the words to really describe what I felt when I saw the absolute storm of support raging through. As you can see below, the show-of-support tweets came in fast and furious in a space of a few hours. And in fact, as you can see, the SEO community tried to get #rishil trending. And although that didn’t happen – in this instance it is definitely an extreme valiant effort and heart-warming to see. At its peak, I counted over 500 tweets…

I knew I had good relationships with people in the search world, what I was unaware of was my value in the search community. The tweets above don’t even show the FaceBook messages, texts, calls, emails chat messages, SEOMoz DMs that came through. I didn’t know that this was the level of regard the community held me in. If this wasn’t a case study in the value of building ties in online communities then I don’t know what is.

I am going to give a special Mention to Brent D Payne (see) who took the fight to his contacts in the twitter world and Al Carlton (twitter) who took the fight offline and called people he knew up. I am also going to give special mentions to Kate Morris (see) and Jill Whalen (see), who I think checked if my profile was back more than I did! A special mention to Rob Bothan and Josh Millord and Dixon Jones whoI believe started the whole thing…

And I wish I could thank everyone of you individually, but hopefully one day I will be able to. I am pretty sure that people who didn’t know me echoed Kenny Hyder’s sentiments:

“I don’t even know @rishil and I want his account unsuspended so I can stop hearing about it”

I must admit the funniest tweet of the barrage was by Stephen Tallamy:

“I’d rather see @rishil in suspenders than see his account suspended #rishil”

The tweets were coming in fast and furious, but I felt (paradox alert) the twitter support deserved more than just a tweet of thanks. This is my thanks. I choke back the wave of warmth I felt seeing all of you chip in. I still cant find the words of appreciation.  I am glad twitter suspended me, cause otherwise I would have never realised what you guys felt about me. I have mentioned often I don’t feel I am a Rockstar, but that day you made me feel like one.

Once again, Thank you.