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By editorial@silicon.com, 26 July 2002 16:45

COMMENT Have you heard of Brian Tindle? The name may well ring a bell. Brian is the central figure in an online soap opera that is currently going on. Earlier this week we carried a brief story about a web message board, actually one for football team Watford, and a supporter of the club, a certain Brian Tindle. On this board he is accused of a bringing back a sexually transmitted disease from a recent holiday in Greece and passing it on to his girlfriend. The accuser - his now ex-girlfriend. The main contributors to the message board - just about everyone else. What subsequently developed was nothing short of a full blown phenomenon. Most of us know about Claire Swire, whose lawyer boyfriend forwarded an email in which she talks about sexually pleasuring him. His friends then forwarded the email, and within a short time millions of people around the world knew about the couple, but mostly raised their eyebrows at the number of people who had seen the email before them. Six degrees of separation indeed. Brian Tindle is different. For one thing, his crime may be more serious. But that's if he even exists. If this is a hoax, placing a posting on a low-key site - with respect to the site's publisher, Rivals.net, and the football club in question - and getting so many people interested is near genius. But if it is a hoax, no one is sure what good it is doing. Rivals.net could certainly be generating lots more impressions by requiring additional clicks to read the latest posting (and we are talking about 1,000 plus to date) instead of having it all on one page. If true, there are also all kinds of legal questions about the parties named, including a perhaps oblivious sales assistant in a local branch of Boots the chemist. No, the only certainty is that the postings reflect the good and bad of net users, from the warm hearted, humorous and plain curious, to the opportunistic ("Hey, visit MY site!"), to the disgusting and the violent. Maybe the Brian Tindle phenomenon won't be another Claire Swire. For one thing, reading the postings, which are updated rapidly, has a certain half life - there is arguably too much back story to get through as time goes on. But because of the people already selling Brian Tindle T-shirts, the domain names that have been bought and the football terrace chants ready to be sung, we reckon Mr Tindle could well be the web personality of the week. Whether he exists or not.