“The first rule of hurricane coverage is that every broadcast must begin with palm trees bending in the wind.”
—Carl Hiaasen

Here’s an email I received this morning that I thought had some pretty interesting data:

Some big news today: By our projections, a Huffington Post reader will post the site’s 200,000,000th comment early tomorrow morning, Friday, October 26th. It took six years for the first hundred million, but only around 15 months for the second. That’s quite a leap forward.

The explosion in commenting represents a new dimension of growth for The Huffington Post, which is not only growing wide — expanding traffic, verticals, bloggers, international editions — but also growing deep:

• From 9/2011 to 9/2012, minutes per visitor have increased by 62%
• Total visits have increased by 138% in that time; and visits per visitor have increased by 116%Our community of commenters has also grown in quality
• 70% of comments are in response to another commenter
•  More than 1,000 people who signed up to comment in 2005 are still commenting once a week
• HuffPost Live is taking all of this to video, mixing world-renowned experts with community pundits in conversations like nobody’s ever seen

Top commented stories of all time are:

Mitt Romney Video: Barack Obama Voters ‘Dependent On Government’ – 171,160 comments

Iran Updates: Live-Blogging The Uprising – 96,281 comments

Supreme Court Health Care Decision: Individual Mandate Survives – 71,632 comments

Ann Romney: We’ve Given ‘All You People Need To Know’ About Family Finances – 68,281 comments

Mitt Romney: ‘I Never Paid Less Than 13 Percent’ In Taxes – 62,562 comments

Halloween is coming, so here’s as good an overview of those classic EC horror comics as you’ll get in about nine minutes. It’s from the 1990 Horror Hall of Fame broadcast and features the legendary William Gaines (who passed away on June 3, 1992) accepting the Publisher award.

… is the history of the Internet, as Copyblogger correctly notes:

“From the very first email sent by researchers in Switzerland in 1971, to modern sites like Google+ and Pinterest, the Internet, and the valuable content it distributes, have always been social.”

Yep. Copyblogger throws in a nifty infographic to emphasize the point.

Woke up this morning to see this tweet from @J_M_McDermott, author of the Inc. article I linked to on Saturday.

“@LOHADdotcom is a shameless self-promoter who did no original reporting and wrote an ‘article’ based on nothing but anecdotal evidence. FYI.”

Well, good morning to you, too, John.

I was tempted to tweet back an equally abrasive personal attack, but I’m really not into flame wars (unless it’s with political extremists, then they can be all kinds of fun, especially in a red-hot election season), though I can’t help but wonder why he had such a visceral reaction to a pretty conventional random observation.

Takeaway for marketers: It’s usually a good thing when you link to articles to let the authors know you’ve done so. Occasionally, though, you’ll be reminded of the the phrase “no good deed goes unpunished.” Don’t sweat it. You can’t please all of the people all of the time, so don’t bother trying.