You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
I hate going to bed angry. Last night, I had to shut off the laptop and scarf one of Sausage's fantastic Chocolate Crinkle cookies before stomping off to bed in a huff. For the first time ever, even La Belle Saucisse's remarkable baking prowess was unable to lift my gloom.
First, there was the whole Sony PSP fake blog fiasco, which still has me seething with indignation. OK, so you massively screwed up - but have the cojones to come out and say that you screwed up, FFS.
No - the sum of Sony's response seems to have been to post one faux-humourous semi-apology to the site, lock off all the negative feedback from view, then take the entire site offline.
It remains offline as of this writing.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Whatcha gonna do, chaps? Deny it ever happened? Make like there's no such thing as a cache?
This ostrich-like behaviour, even more so than them committing egregious acts of fake bloggery in the first place, has me practically incandescent with indignation.
So then, as I'm still fuming over this episode, I come across the news that there are individuals and even companies out there building a business around gaming the social bookmarking sites - Digg, del.icio.us, et al. I was spluttering and slack-jawed with disgust at this last night. I still am.
Jason Calacanis has been all over this story, even posting a bounty of US$100 for tips leading to the exposure of social news scammers.
Check this out - here's a site overtly offering a service to drive your bookmarks higher up in the rankings at Digg (for a fee, of course). Gah! There's even one of these flagitious organizations right here in Toronto (according to the info in their Whois record). Bastards.
Vaspers believes this kind of thing will kill the blogosphere. I don't know - I still have some faith in the intelligence and discernment of educated humanity, and the self-policing resilience of the blogosphere (I'm a bloggyanna, perhaps).
The fact that the Sony PSP site disappeared could be read as a good thing. It was clueless; outed as such; and duly killed - helps to ensure more credulous punters won't accidentally stumble into the cluehole.
But I do know that the pollution and stench of this kind of behaviour continues to cast a pall over the actions of the profession to which I belong. Many of the most negative discussions tracking these two areas of unpleasantness (the Sony PSP thing and the emerging practice of paying to stack the social boomarking sites) point to PR people and agencies as the culprits. Not true, as far as I can tell, but it's understandable that the scumbag lowlife label continues to flow towards us. We have got to do better, all of us.
I'm a bit more mellow tonight, sitting on the bed with a glass of Rioja, listening to the soothing downstairs chatter of Sausage's book club friends. I'm resisting the urge to go and check out the comments at Jason's blog - for tonight, at least, I can't bear it getting any worse.
(Pat yourself on the back in a sad and rather geeky way, btw, if you can correctly identify the source of my headline.)
First, there was the whole Sony PSP fake blog fiasco, which still has me seething with indignation. OK, so you massively screwed up - but have the cojones to come out and say that you screwed up, FFS.
No - the sum of Sony's response seems to have been to post one faux-humourous semi-apology to the site, lock off all the negative feedback from view, then take the entire site offline.
It remains offline as of this writing.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Whatcha gonna do, chaps? Deny it ever happened? Make like there's no such thing as a cache?
This ostrich-like behaviour, even more so than them committing egregious acts of fake bloggery in the first place, has me practically incandescent with indignation.
So then, as I'm still fuming over this episode, I come across the news that there are individuals and even companies out there building a business around gaming the social bookmarking sites - Digg, del.icio.us, et al. I was spluttering and slack-jawed with disgust at this last night. I still am.
Jason Calacanis has been all over this story, even posting a bounty of US$100 for tips leading to the exposure of social news scammers.
Check this out - here's a site overtly offering a service to drive your bookmarks higher up in the rankings at Digg (for a fee, of course). Gah! There's even one of these flagitious organizations right here in Toronto (according to the info in their Whois record). Bastards.
Vaspers believes this kind of thing will kill the blogosphere. I don't know - I still have some faith in the intelligence and discernment of educated humanity, and the self-policing resilience of the blogosphere (I'm a bloggyanna, perhaps).
The fact that the Sony PSP site disappeared could be read as a good thing. It was clueless; outed as such; and duly killed - helps to ensure more credulous punters won't accidentally stumble into the cluehole.
But I do know that the pollution and stench of this kind of behaviour continues to cast a pall over the actions of the profession to which I belong. Many of the most negative discussions tracking these two areas of unpleasantness (the Sony PSP thing and the emerging practice of paying to stack the social boomarking sites) point to PR people and agencies as the culprits. Not true, as far as I can tell, but it's understandable that the scumbag lowlife label continues to flow towards us. We have got to do better, all of us.
I'm a bit more mellow tonight, sitting on the bed with a glass of Rioja, listening to the soothing downstairs chatter of Sausage's book club friends. I'm resisting the urge to go and check out the comments at Jason's blog - for tonight, at least, I can't bear it getting any worse.
(Pat yourself on the back in a sad and rather geeky way, btw, if you can correctly identify the source of my headline.)
