mediajunk

Yet another humourous web-related clip:

I'd never encountered the term payola before today, when I encountered it in a Wall Street Journal article.

Entitled The Wizards of Buzz, the article discusses the emergence of an influential kind of super-user on social bookmarking type websites such as Digg:

Items that receive enough votes rise in the rankings and appear on the front page, which can be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. When an item is submitted by a popular or influential member -- one whose postings are closely followed by fellow members -- it can have a much better shot at making the front page.

These influencers are what Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point) would call "mavens".

Indeed, the influence that a small "cabal" of 30 or so Digg users have over what appears on the site's homepage has often been noted by annoyed bloggers, with some even claiming that Digg's rigged (which reminds me of that silly but cool line in Pulp Fiction: Ed's Dead baby, Ed's Dead [which in turn ripped off an obscure but great Pixies song]).

This led to Digg changing the algorithm that determines how articles make it to the front page, although this only fuelled more speculation among SEO practioners about how to crack that algorithm.

The WSJ article claims that marketers are teaming up to offer web payola:

Payola schemes depend on the voting system these sites employ. Some marketing companies promise clients they can get a client front-page exposure on Digg or one of the other social-bookmarking sites in exchange for a fee, according to marketers. To deliver on that promise, the company then recruits members at the site, offering to pay them for thumbs-up votes on the posting that links to the client.

In the "early" days of SEO (more than three years ago), the only site (or algorithm) marketers cared about was Google's. Now, it seems, there are more and more sites to reverse engineer . Getting to the homepage of Youtube or MySpace can break a garage band. Could it break a garage brand?

In case you're wondering, I wrote the title of this entry with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek.

Enjoy:

We interrupt the irregular Mediajunk schedule to bring you the following Powerpoint-esque examination of questions about life:

Google has had a movie review feature for about a year now but I've only discovered it recently.

Simply type "movie:name of the movie" into the regular Google search box. I like the way Google identifies -- and distinguishes -- positive and negative reviews from other sites, then creates an aggregate review score.

These techniques has been around for a while on sites like movies.com, IMDB and rottentomatoes.com, but Google presents them in a simple, clean, uncluttered way, that's free of overbearing "rich media" advertising.

Personally, I like to read the BBC's review of any film I'm considering, along with Entertainment.ie's review (usually penned by friend-of-Mediajunk Gavin Burke). These reviewers' preferences and opinions tend to be close to my own. Perhaps its a cultural thing?

If you want to see lists of good movies, I'd recommend the BBC's a-z of reviews (in particular, the 4-star and 5-star reviews), or for good 2006 movies, check out the Golden Tomatoes.

Proof that we are living in an information economy comes in a New York Times articles about the market for Microsoft Vista bugs (or in the corporate giant's own parlance, "known issues"):

When its predecessor, Windows XP, was released five years ago, software bugs were typically hunted by hackers for fame and glory, not financial reward. But now software vulnerabilities -- as with stolen credit-card numbers and spammable e-mail addresses -- carry real financial value. They are commonly bought, sold and traded online, both by legitimate security companies, which say they are providing a service, and by nefarious hackers and thieves.

So how much does a bug sell for?

The Japanese security firm Trend Micro said in December that it had found a Vista flaw for sale on a Romanian Web forum for $50,000.

Wow, fifty big ones, eh? Are bugs hard to find?

“To find a vulnerability, you have to do a lot of hard work,” said Evgeny Legerov, founder of a small security firm, Gleg Ltd., in Moscow.

How times have changed. In the early 1990s, users willingly documented MSWord bugs and brought them to Microsoft's attention, in a desperate effort to have the product improved. James Gleick's 1992 article, Chasing Bugs in the Electronic Village, documents how bugs were becoming a major problem even then.

Bugs are [software's] special curse. They are an ancient devil -- the product defect -- in a peculiarly exasperating modern dress. As software grows more complex and we come to rely on it more, the industry is discovering that bugs are more pervasive and more expensive than ever before... When a program doubles in size, the potential for unexpected bugs more than doubles -- far more, just as the number of potential love affairs more than doubles when the population of your office rises from 10 to 20...

15 years later, bugs have become an industry in their own right.

Sidebar: Bill Gates met with the Romanian president Traian Basescu yesterday, who attributed the success of his country's IT industry to, eh, pirated copies of Microsoft products. Unsurprisingly, Bill gates (who apparently seemed a little shocked by the remarks) did not comment.