In yesterdays adcritic email Jim quipped sarcastically:
"A lot of bloggers are, um, buzzing about the cover story in yesterday'sYou can check Technorati to see how many people blogged that NYT article.
New York Times Magazine about Boston word-of-mouth firm BzzAgent. We assume this is because they are all secretly working for the company."
While that is not suprising in the least, the rocket rise of comment spam on blogs lately is annoying as hell, and it seems being used to discredit people. Kevin at nadablog.com had to blacklist blogethics.org, bzzagent.com and womma.com from his blog as he was getting spam from said domains. He also got blogspam from calacanis.weblogsinc.com, but it looks like this was done without J Calacanis knowledge, see this post Comment Spam not from me… BzzAgent and WOMMA taking the low road?
It looks to me like the blogspammers are nothing but spammers, rather than actual marketeers with a clue, does this apply to their growing rooster of agents written about in the NYT who shill everything from hot dogs to lipgloss to their friends as well? Do you know a spammer? What should we call the real life version of them?
Here in Denmark, yesterdays Metro newspaper lead with the headline "Hidden advertisments everywhere" and Minister Henriette Kjær calls for making stealth advertising in any way shape or form illegal. The consumer ombudsman Hagen Jørgensen has been calling for stricter laws since 1999: "I have tried to get a debate going about hidden advertisments for a long time. If we don't acknowledge hiddens ads as a problem soon the Danish consumers won't be able to choose when they will be advertised to."
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Hmmm... Now, Who the comment spammer might be is anybody's guess - as even the WOMMA homepage now carris this message:
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PermalinkStrange... Is someone trying to discredit all these people - or (more likely) is at least one of the links mentioned THE spammer trying toi get higher googlerank?
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PermalinkSomewhat related - This post by Justin Kirby should be a read as well The Hidden (in Plain Sight) Persuaders debate
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PermalinkI've had time to look around a little and here's my delayed two cents.
I think a person from the NYT forums on that hidden persuaders article is doing the spamming. It discredits Blogethics which might have been a good thing (full disclaimer I have no idea what Calacanis would do with it), it discredits Calacanis, It spams the WOMMA and Bzzagent URL - and the latter have yet to deny doing it (though a denial doesn't mean much). Either it's a bzzzagent gone nuts or it's someone who got really mad at the Bzzagents poor behaviour in the NYT forums who decided to discredit all the big names in one fell swoop. There are some very hostile people in the forum there, mainly the Bzzagents (or those who claim to be one) at the start but after a while, the moderate non WOMarketeers are getting angry at them. Could be either of the two camps.
To steal the funniest thing I Saw in the forums: BzzAgent. We Put The Double-Quotes In "Friend".
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