Good piece (video) by Jon Ronson about astroturfing: Esc and Ctrl: Jon Ronson investigates astroturfing – video In the second part of Jon Ronson’s series about the struggle for control of the internet, he looks at online astroturfing – when unpopular institutions post fake blogs to seem more favourable. He meets the former vice president… Read More »
Is business networking site Congoo resorting to spam to build its user base? I suspect it is. Congoo is on one hand a good idea — a place to gather and monitor content on your industry, including content that is usually subscription only (like WSJ.com, who publish my weekly Loose Wire column.) But it’s also… Read More »
You’re probably getting bored of spam statistics by now, and I wouldn’t blame you. But here’s another milestone, courtesy of MessageLabs, who monitor this kind of thing: December was a new record, they say, for the ratio of spam to ordinary email. In that month, MessageLabs scanned some 463 million emails and found that 1… Read More »
As I noted earlier, AlphaSmart are upgrading their Dana keyboard (a PDA? a laptop? a word-processor?) to include Wi-Fi. It’s now out. The Dana Wireless includes Wi-Fi (802.11b) connectivity and software applications for accessing the Internet. AlphaSmart are aiming at students and educators, professionals in healthcare, energy, social services, insurance, etc. which have Wi-Fi in… Read More »