As the hottest place to be surfing on the face of the planet Earth right now – the world wide web, affectionately known as www, the web or more formally “the internet” gathers momentum and maturity with every passing day – having already survived a .com tsunami years ago – the internet is shaping up and proving to be a major social reformer, connector of people from all corners of the globe, a hot “must use” marketing tool and darn good top quality interactive entertainment.
It’s a creative user-generated media space where people can interact with each other despite geographic, time, educational, political, social, cultural or economic differences. One of the great ground breaking beauties of the web, is while people still tend to gather with their similar social groups and interest categories, creating mostly a harmonious, enjoyable and rewarding experience for everybody – completely different haunts and interest groups are available at the press of a couple of buttons. The web is a fun educational tool.
Now many people might think that the internet, because of it’s seemingly digital anonymity, is a place free of social responsibility. There is strong debate and conjecture in Australia currently concerning a draconian plan to enforce an internet filter – supposedly to counteract the availability of gross and shameful kiddie porn and bestiality. Personally, I’ve never seen such websites on the internet, primarily because it’s one area of contemporary life, I completely and utterly have no interest in whatsoever. But let’s save this topic for another discussion.
To make matters clear to everybody once and for all – this marvellous innovation of humanity, the internet, isn’t as anonymous as some people might think. It’s positively a hive of thriving credentials, legitimate identity and reputation. All websites and published information may be found and tracked by anybody who knows how to do it. Your IP address to can be ascertained. There is monitoring companies here in Australia and around the world that can track and record what people are saying about you, your business, your brand, personality, work and more.
There’s online identity management companies that focus purely on creating and managing your online brand whether it be your personal brand “You” or your company or business. There is definitely acceptable practices and procedures to marketing and representation, despite the massive virtual information world the web has wonderfully become. Often, these procedures and practices are broken.
As I write this blog post, I can see that my wordpress.com Akismet spam filter has trapped over 2400 spam comments or posts in the 20 months we’ve been writing christopher copywriter’s blog. A startling 1256 of them were received by us only last month. I haven’t seriously read one of them. Thankfully spam filters are quite accurate and efficient these days and I trust them most of the time.
In New York, yesterday a New York City Lawyer was convicted for assuming numerous false identities online and making posts in an attempt to sway public opinion -
THURSDAY Sep 30, 2010 17:38 ET
NY lawyer convicted in Dead Sea Scrolls case
By COLLEEN LONG, Associated Press
A scholar’s son was convicted Thursday of using online aliases to harass and discredit his father’s detractors in a heated academic debate over the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
A Manhattan jury found Raphael Golb guilty of 30 counts against him, including identity theft, forgery and harassment. He was acquitted of one count of criminal impersonation.
Golb didn’t react as he heard the verdict in the unusual criminal trial over claims of Internet impersonation — even more unusual because of its arcane subject. He said outside court he wasn’t surprised by the verdict, because he felt the judge’s instructions to the jury were biased. He planned to appeal. As he sat on a bench, he said: “I’m stoic.”
“I’m looking forward to the appeal,” he said. “But not with joy, just because that is what happens next.”
Prosecutors said Golb, 50, used fake e-mail accounts and wrote blog posts under assumed names to take his father’s side in an obscure but sharp-elbowed scholarly dispute over the scrolls’ origins. Golb acknowledged on the stand that he crafted the e-mails and blog posts, but said the writings amounted to academic whistle-blowing and blogosphere banter — not crime. He said he was using irony, satire and parody to expose a plagiarist.
Defense Attorney Ron Kuby said the case was a clear violation of the First Amendment.
“Today what happened was the District Attorney of New York County and the trial court made hurting somebody’s feelings a criminal act,” he said. “And in New York, hurting people’s feelings or being annoying is not a crime, we call that Monday.”
The jury deliberated about five hours. Golb was acquitted of impersonating one scholar, but convicted of identity theft, harassment and criminal impersonation of Dr. Lawrence Schiffman, a longtime rival of his father’s whom he said plagiarized research and was never punished. Schiffman took the case to authorities.
Golb’s father and Schiffman, who is chairman of New York University’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies have long disagreed on the origins of the texts. Schiffman says they were assembled by a sect known as the Essenes. Norman Golb, a University of Chicago professor, believes the writings to be the work of a range of Jewish groups and communities.
Scholars are split on the debate; there are supporters of both arguments.
Raphael Golb, a linguistics scholar and lawyer with degrees from Oberlin College, Harvard University and NYU, said he was angry the plagiarism accusations were never brought to light and that his father’s theory was being smeared online.
Golb created an account under Schiffman’s name and sent messages from it to Schiffman’s students and colleagues. They pointed to blog posts about the plagiarism allegation and asked the recipients to help keep it quiet. “This is my career at stake,” some of the e-mails said.
The blog posts, too, were Raphael Golb’s work under other names, prosecutors said. They said he also opened up e-mail accounts in the names of other scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Schiffman denies copying Norman Golb’s work and says he’s never had a personal problem with the Chicago historian.
He said in a statement Thursday that he was appreciative of the work on the case.
“Let us hope that the field of Dead Sea Scrolls research can get back to its real business — interpreting the ancient scrolls and explaining their significance for the history of Judaism and the background of early Christianity,” he said.
Jurors left without speaking to reporters. During the three-week trial, they were given a history lesson on the more than 2,000-year-old documents, found in caves in Israel in the 1940s by a Bedouin shepherd searching for a lost goat. The texts contain the earliest known versions of portions of the Hebrew Bible and have provided important insight into the history of Judaism and the beginnings of Christianity.
Access to the scrolls was tightly controlled by a group known as the monopoly. Jewish scholars — including Norman Golb — were not allowed to evaluate them. The controlled access to the scrolls continues, Golb argued during his testimony. He said his father was excluded from participating in workshops and museum exhibits on the texts while other more popular scholars were invited.
District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance said stealing money isn’t the only type of identity fraud.
“Using fictitious identities to impersonate victims is not what open academic debate seeks to foster,” he said.
Golb faces at least four years in prison on the top charge when he is sentenced Nov. 18. He is free until then.
While Internet impersonation claims have generated lawsuits, prosecutions are rare unless phony identities are used to steal money, experts say.
In one high-profile prosecution, Missouri mother Lori Drew was accused of helping her daughter and a friend pose as a teen boy on MySpace to send hurtful messages to a 13-year-old neighbour girl. The girl committed suicide.
A federal jury in California, where MySpace has its servers, convicted Drew of misdemeanor counts of accessing computers without authorisation. A judge overturned the verdict and acquitted her.
——
Associated Press Writer Jennifer Peltz contributed to this report.
Australian website Anthill a few days ago published an article written by James Tuckerman in an attempt to clarify and define responsible internet protocol in regards to contributions and postings.
They make mention of some of christophercopywriter’s posts around the net and on their own website. We do make quite a few – we like and encourage debate, discussion and intelligent useful information sharing – given free of charge and completely out of goodwill – most of the very best internet marketers around the world use this method of interaction and marketing. Technically it’s called, the “free marketing” method. Whereby quality, valuable and free information and articles are offered to anybody who may be wisely interested thereby proving knowledge from their niche field of writing to the wider reading universe. Have a read of an extract of the Anthill article below… Note christopher copywriter’s mention -
Is Kylie Minogue using spammers to promote her latest album?
September 27, 2010 | By James Tuckerman
If you haven’t already noticed, we use a service called Disqus to manage the reader comments found at the foot of our posts.
It’s a pretty cool tool. For example, it allows users to log in using their Twitter, Facebook and other social media accounts to leave comments and share their online movements with their friends and followers.
Of course, it also raises awareness of our brand, in the process, and increases the number of valuable backlinks to our site.
One thing that it does particularly well is learn, through the actions of many, what comments are likely to be the work of comment spammers.
What is a comment spammer?
Now, I’m not talking about the type of spam that arrives in your email account offering discount viagra and the riches of fallen Nigerian royalty.
I’m talking about the machines that now spray meaningless chatter throughout the bloggersphere, as comments, hoping to get a click back to the offending site.
For example, there is a big distinction between reading an article, leaving a thoughtful comment and then inviting readers to check out your site or service elsewhere — as a real human being, engaged in the conversation — and programming robots to isolate keywords and dump random comments that hopefully somehow reflect the substance of the post.
For example, christopher copywriter is a real person and sometimes leaves comments to complement Anthill articles, such as this one: The eight scams peddled by SEO consultants. In the example given, he also invites readers to check out his activities, views and credentials on his own website as an extension of his comments.
That is perfectly okay. Christopher is adding to the discussion.
What is not okay are comments such as:
I like your work!, http://intense[sic].com/people/buyhydrocodon. Buy buy hydrocodone, duyh.
This comment appeared last month at the foot of a generic introduction to an innovation feature posted in 2007. The article was not work worthy of praise. But, aside from the misdirected positivity, it’s not hard to second-guess that the comment is text-book spam.
This type of pure spam posting has been around since the beginning of the internet.
It’s usually referred to as “Sock Puppetry“- the offender is rightfully termed a “Sock Puppet” and it contributes nothing of any real tangible value to anybody. It’s a very weak and bad tasted attempt to gain some notoriety for themselves back at their own website, usually for some sort of vague attempt at financial remuneration. It’s called spam because it has all the authentic value and tastiness of that wonderful meat product of the same name.
Same goes with anonymous comments. Anybody can post negative thoughtless and sometimes offensive crap under an anonymous pseudonym. Have a quick squizz at this stories comments section from people purporting to be working in advertising on mUmbrella. Did you take a look? Professional critique hey.. WT.. ? If only the clients knew – but the comments could be coming from anywhere around the world… Spam filter standards are the only answer, as is editors ethics, style, points of view and standards - or perhaps, should the comments flow free??
When the worlds current number one most loved brand google, is working hard and getting seriously innovative to do it’s best to make the internet as pleasing for users as possible, even going so far as to scratch mere seconds of each and every users search time though the new creation of google instant, claiming -
- Before Google Instant, the typical searcher took more than 9 seconds to enter a search term, and we saw many examples of searches that took 30-90 seconds to type.
- Using Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.
- If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second.
- 15 new technologies contribute to Google Instant functionality.
It makes one wonder why any editor or blogger would tolerate anonymous mindless dribble on their site. It does fill up space, take up time, but I guess it should be admitted it creates more hits and a bit of buzz on some sites – especially mUmbrella. Yet still, it is a waste of time. A bit of harmless fun perhaps in certain circumstances.
In NYC’s Dead Sea Scrolls case we see it’s been ruled as fraudulent. The repercussions were politically motivated and a deliberate and premeditated attempt at swaying opinion and debate for personal gain. That old adage, a little favourite of mine – “Does the means, justify the ends?” definitely comes to mind. Why are people writing what they write and publishing what they publish, and how are they doing it – who, what, why, when and where – does it effect?
The internet as a media sits between, public relations, marketing, copywriting, advertising, web design, journalism, film making, art direction and politics. Please forgive us if we missed something. But all of these skills will help someone communicating a message online. The message simply needs to be targeted and positioned for its driving purpose. It’s simple semiotics. Only it doesn’t seem to be all that simple – for most people.
And the debate rages on…
