Cocadaboa

» see cocadaboa.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Cocadaboa was a Brazilian humor site run by Wagner Martins, who signed everything as Mr. Manson, a name borrowed from both Charles and Marilyn. He started it in 2001 with a small group of friends writing under handles like Eddie Torres, MEM, Sherlock Holmes da Silva, P.I.R.U. and Mulher Maravilha. The Wayback Machine first saw the domain on 29 March 2002.

The house disclaimer was one line: everything published here is "humorous, false, or both". Recurring sections included the Bolão Pé na Cova, literally the foot-in-the-grave betting pool, and S.a.C.aneie, a pun on the Brazilian acronym for customer service. By early 2006 Perfil News counted 12,000 visitors a day.

Martins was an economist by training, from Rio. In the middle of 2005 he moved to São Paulo to work in guerrilla marketing and became a partner in the agency Espalhe. The site's tagline in its last years was "Orgulho de ser polêmico", proud to be controversial.

~ the chronicle ~

~ humorous, false, or both ~

The specialty was the planted scoop. In September 2004 Cocadaboa announced Sexkut, supposedly an Orkut for sex, and several news sites covered it as real before anyone checked. In 2005, ahead of the October referendum on banning gun sales, it produced an interview with a Rio drug trafficker called Xaxim who supported the ban. Perfil News names Ricardo Noblat and Pedro Dória among the columnists who were caught at one time or another.

January 2005 was the loudest month. The site announced that, with a reader who went by Vinícius K-Max, it had used a scripting hole in Internet Explorer to seize some of the largest communities on Orkut and turn them into ads for Firefox, which was two months past its 1.0 release. Portuguese Wikipedia still writes the episode in the conditional, and the press column Observatório da Imprensa filed it under the title "Os patos do Cocadaboa", the suckers of Cocadaboa. The reaction is better documented: hundreds of protest communities and a flood of scraps on Manson's profile.

There were side projects in the same spirit. Leilões Bizarros collected the strangest listings on Mercado Livre, and a featured auction could draw around two thousand visits in a few hours, along with a wave of sarcastic questions for the seller. In August 2006 Manson raffled off a "famous blog" by selling a thousand stickers at 10 reais each, with every sticker doubling as a ticket. The prize was a ready-made blog with his help for the first months. According to Portuguese Wikipedia the stickers were never delivered and the winner did not become famous.

~ the pepsi logo ~

The targets answered with lawyers. The TV host Luciano Huck and the singer Sandy were among the celebrities who sued for defamation. In 2002 the site moved its hosting to the United States to stay out of reach of Brazilian courts, and the same year three large providers, UOL among them, were reported to be blocking it for their subscribers until the columnist Cora Rónai wrote about it in O Globo. In 2003 a notice from Coca-Cola forced a change of logo. The replacement was modeled on Pepsi's.

~ ele voltou? ~

The humor site stopped without a goodbye. The February 2010 capture of the homepage still leads with a post from 22 July 2009, ten tips for saving Formula 1, with 190 comments under it. By 27 October 2010 the domain forwarded to cocadaboa.com/mrmanson, a page that gathered his activity from other sites. In March 2014 Martins launched Tjay.tv, a video curation app, with 50,000 reais and a former UOL product manager as co-founder.

In 2015 the domain woke up as a plain blog under the header "Ele voltou?", is he back? The bio read, in Portuguese: "Wagner Martins, 36. I owe everything I have to a blog, but for a decade I was stupid enough to abandon it." A post from 3 May 2015 compared renting a São Paulo taxi with driving for Uber. The last one is dated 2 November 2016. The homepage was last captured in working order on 13 November 2017, and by 16 December the address returned a 404.

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