Fifty or so other Republican candidates have also been made targets in a sophisticated “Google bombing” campaign intended to game the search engine’s ranking algorithms. By flooding the Web with references to the candidates and repeatedly cross-linking to specific articles and sites on the Web, it is possible to take advantage of Google’s formula and force those articles to the top of the list of search results.

The project was originally aimed at 70 Republican candidates but was scaled back to roughly 50 because Chris Bowers, who conceived it, thought some of the negative articles too partisan.

The articles to be used “had to come from news sources that would be widely trusted in the given district,” said Mr. Bowers, a contributor at MyDD.com (Direct Democracy), a liberal group blog. “We wanted actual news reports so it would be clear that we weren’t making anything up.”

Each name is associated with one article. Those articles are embedded in hyperlinks that are now being distributed widely among the left-leaning blogosphere. In an entry at MyDD.com this week, Mr. Bowers said: “When you discuss any of these races in the future, please, use the same embedded hyperlink when reprinting the Republican’s name. Then, I suppose, we will see what happens.”

The popular news page on Technorati indicates that enough blogs are participating in this to make the target stories some of the most widely linked in the blogosphere right now.

File this under information warfare case studies... Rattle made the prediction awhile back that we would see a rise in politically motivated Google Bombing at key times.

A New Campaign Tactic: Manipulating Google Data - New York Times

McNorton said the team contacts bloggers to inform the writers about any given topic that may have been posted on their site. This outreach effort enables the team to offer complete information to bloggers by inviting them to visit CENTCOM's Web site for news releases, data or imagery.

The team engages bloggers who are posting inaccurate or untrue information, as well as bloggers who are posting incomplete information. They extend a friendly invitation to all bloggers to visit the command's Web site...

"We don't go in there and get into a debate," he said.

One of the members of this team is Army Spc. Patrick Ziegler, who has recently created a MemeStreams account.

A friend of mine used to be a manager at a telemarketing call center. She said they had a high employee attrition rate because the people who worked there would take it personally when they got hung up on or yelled at by the people they were cold calling. I was kind of amazed by that. I figured if you were in telemarketing you knew what you were in for.

This sort of reminds me of that. Running around the blogosphere posting serious information without getting emotionally involved in the chorus of opinions being lobbed at you requires a spectacular degree of detachment. Its certainly easier then getting shot at on the streets of Iraq, but its about as close as the Internet gets.

DefenseLINK News: CENTCOM Team Engages 'Bloggers'

The power center of the axis of evil has a blog. You can post comments. :)

يادداشت هاي شخصي احمدي نژاد

New Web 2.0 venture!

"People always used to approach me to try and talk about this or that. I wanted to punch them in the throat. Now they leave me the hell alone. Thanks isolatr!" - Doc Searls

isolatr beta

Smith said Microsoft will remove blogs only when given proper legal notice. And even then, it will block access to that material only within the country where it is deemed unlawful. The site will still be viewable from outside the country, he said.

Cheers to Microsoft for having a backbone.

Update: Microsoft revamps blogging policy - Computerworld

A group representing global newspaper publishers has launched a lobbying campaign to challenge search engines like Google that aggregate news content.

The move comes as the newspaper industry's traditional business model is under pressure with advertising spending shifting away from print and toward the Internet.

If you can't remix the news, the Internet won't help people engage in dialog about the news, and control what is considered relevent.

The most important lawsuit of the century approaches...

The 38 million subscribers to MySpace, which News Corp bought for $629m (355m) last July, discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens.

MySpace gets into the competitive censorship game and quickly learns that they very much do not have control of the thing they just bought.

Myspace stumbles

Printing presses are the prized platform of a public lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel, and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Ben Franklin and John Hancock.

In case you missed it Forbes Magazine published an insanely vindictive scare post on bloggers in this month's issue, which claims that bloggers are an untamed lynch mob and suggests all kinds of unethical things for containing them (honestly explaining the truth is not considered). Forbes doesn't let you read the article for free so I'm linking the EFF's response instead.

Forbes 'Attack of the Blogs'

Last week OSM (Open Source Media) launched to what some are calling an odd start. Most notably naming a controversy has ensued with Christopher Lydon's public radio show Open Source, a production of Open Source Media, Inc..

This is kind of entertaining.

Christopher Lydon runs a NPR program called "Open Source Radio." It is produced by Brendan Greeley, who ran the podcasting panel at BlogNashville.

They have a trademark on the term "Open Source Media."

This is a bit troubling. Open Source is a generic term referring to a type of software. I can see how in the context of the radio dial a show called "Open Source Radio" might be unique, but you are taking a generic term and recontextualizing it. If you go back to the original context (I.E. the net) you're going to cause confusion and conflict. This is particularly true if you are trying to be the only guy on the entire Internet calling yourself "Open Source Media" or publishing podcasts with that name. Not to mention the fact that trademarking that term kind of misses the point.

It was, of course, inevitable that someone else would come along on the Internet and try to make something else called "Open Source Media." As it turns out, its Glen Reynolds and his merry band of Republican bloggers. (I don't think his project is designed to be partisan but it remains to be seen how it will pan out.) Reynold's "Open Source Media" also happens to have nothing at all to do with software, and at the outset apparently had some unfriendly copyright terms associated with it as well, which kind of misses the point.

So of course a battle ensues between "Open Source Media" and "Open Source Media" over who is allowed to use that name, not on the radio, but on the net, where the term is in common use and really has little to do with anything either of these people are doing. You'd think, you know, these guys would have bumped into each other at BlogNashville or online at some point before all this went down. Whats more, one wonders what the hell either FM radio and "Carnival of trying-to-increase-the-Google-Rank-of-my-partisan-allies" has to do with real many to many media. The end result is a lot of people trying very hard to look savvy and failing very miserably at it.

Read this article on the Open Source Media launch party. Its worth it.

Slashdot | 'Open Source Media' vs 'Open Source Media, Inc'

Digg gets up to 1,000 links submitted every day and 500,000 visitors each month, radiating traffic around the web. Its growth has been so pronounced that the site's own server melted down earlier this month.

But extra infrastructure and new staff will be added, thanks to a $2.8 million investment from a high-profile consortium of angel investors, including Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen.

Well, this is annoying news. Digg is very similar to MemeStreams. We do the technology better, but they have a much better look and feel, thanks, of course, to the fact that they have millions of dollars in funding to hire designers and pay people to sit and code.

We could beat the pants off of them for a fraction of this money.

Wired News: Digg has millions in funding