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Posts on ‘March 28th, 2007’

Gaming the Ratings, Net Style

The Personal Democracy Forum’s techPresident site reports convincingly in “YouTube Gets Pwned: Obama’s Numbers Don’t Add Up” that the viewership numbers for an Obama campaign video are being inflated by people gaming the system. It was inevitable, and there’s precedent in the analog media world. Newspaper circulation numbers have been fraudulently hyped, for example. The […]

Comment Spam and Its Consequences

In the past 24 hours this blog has received more than 1,600 comment spams — fake comments with links to the usual sleazy Web operations that pollute the online world. The  spam-control system I use, Akismet, has trapped almost all of the spams, so you won’t be burdened with them. Unfortunately, it’s also possible that […]

German Views on Media Changes

At the Kölner Journalistenschule today in Cologne, Germany, I’ve received a polite but not entirely warm reception in discussing the citizen media shift and its value to the business and economic journalists who are attending this one-day conference. This is not a shock. Germany remains perhaps the most traditional media market in western Europe, and […]