This one will be everywhere this week…

The creator of Wordpress, the CMS underpinning this site and thousands of others was approached about hosting hidden articles in order to game Google PageRank system for a significant amount of money. He took it and set up the spam without disclosing it to all of the saps running Wordpress linking back to his site.

I consider this more astroturfing than spam, given the lack of a direct human audience and complicit host. You are kidding yourself if you don’t think every major media producer and services provider doesn’t do the same thing every day. They hire professional advertising firms who then create a campaign visible in print, film and television media as well as the web. Where there is an advantage to be had in maybe hiring a few people mildly familiar with online communities to infiltrate and hype, it will be taken. They hide behind proxies. They feed fans pre-release information that ‘leaked’. They justify it in thinking that they are providing a service. Thoughts?