In the trade, we call this “astroturfing.” Astroturf is a fake plastic grass, from which this practice gets its name. A swelling tide of public opinion is called a grassroots movement. So astroturf, then, is a fake grassroots campaign, made to look like genuine opinion but actually it’s a paid advertisement. You have to start wondering about that comment on Slashdot, that story submitted to Digg, or that tweet from a follower recommending some product – are they really who they say they are?

In a three-part series, tech blogger Penguin Pete explains just how much of what we read online is astroturf. It’s a shocking revelation when you consider just how much business is going on out there. The next time you’re on Facebook and you have a friend there complaining about Google, consider that they just might be part of a “whisper campaign.” And don’t be naive enough to think that Google doesn’t probably do the same thing back!

Peter Brittain

Proposition One: Nobody owes you an answer.
When you have a question, you are imposing on another person to do you a favor. There is no law, nor moral obligation, for anyone else to answer your question. That’s at all, whether Google exists or not, whether you can find the answer on Google or not. Both Google and people are going out of their way to help you for free.

Proposition two: The only motivation people have to answer your question is to do something kind.
That’s it. Invisible-hand-of-the-marketplace or not, every time a human answers another human’s question for free, they are practicing altruism. It might have the secondary assumption that you’ll “pay it forward” and help other people, or the feeling of obligation that the answerer is paying it forward, or because helping the questioner helps the answerer indirectly, and so on. But all answers start with a desire to help.

Proposition three: Brain power is a scarce resource.
Try answering a series of questions from a crowd as fast as you can, such as at a press conference. And not walk away after awhile with “no comment.” You ran out of brain power, see? People who know the answers to the hardest questions are rare, and they are becoming rarer. Their time is more valuable than the time of the people asking questions.

Proposition four: Search engines were created for a reason.
And that is to fill the gap between knowledge providers and knowledge seekers. Instead of having to answer the same question twice (no question should ever have to be answered twice), you can put it online and other people can find it.

Our conclusion is “All questions should be Googled first.” Regardless. Even if it doesn’t make sense. Google it first anyway. You’d be surprised. The video called “Google fail” is a troll. “Suggest” is not the answer. And, to follow Alexia Tsotsis’ flawed logic, if “How do you think Google got all that information in the first place?” is reason to bother a human instead of Google, then it’s also a reason to call Google’s failures human failures, since Google-suggest is based on what people type in!

If you do any kind of work in the eCommerce sector, you prick up your ears whenever you hear the names of the most successful web entrepreneurs. They’re the examples to follow. Hitch your wagon to their star and they’ll lead you to riches. But the trouble is spotting them early enough. Wouldn’t it have been great, for instance, to get in on the ground floor on Twitter? The first person on the scene can scoop up treasure with both hands that the rest of us have to hustle just to get a scrap of.

The reasons given for favoring founding CEOs boil down to the fact that they were the people with the original vision and passion, and know their company and their business in the most comprehensive way. But the fact is that all the good ideas are not at all taken – you probably have ten or so sitting around waiting their turn. It’s just that the time has to be right for each idea to reach its maximum potential. And knowing that time, and being there right when it happens, is the stuff that ecommerce legends are made of.

Really, an answer engine does sound like it’d be handy. Like talking to the HAL 9000, right? You ask a question and it answers. But reviews around the web at first ran to something like, well, this AskReaMaor guy really put it through its paces.

That last example was almost a year ago, so how is the big Alpha Wolf doing these days from the main site? Let’s try the kind of things anybody would want an answer engine for.

year first search engine appeared” – blank, dumb look. Exact same phrase in Wikipedia’s search box pulled up at least the Web search engine page.
- “convert five euro to yen” – Y570.38! Wolfram Alpha always does well with calculations.
- “inception director” – Christopher Nolan!
- “al kooper band” – it assumed that “al” was the state of Alabama in the USA. Come on, Al Kooper discovered Lynyrd Skynyrd, and played in Blood Sweat & Tears and The Blues Project, amongst many other achievements!
- “john lennon band” – Here, it at least pulled up John Lennon, along with vital statistics, but still could not tell me what band he was in.
- “microsoft founder” – It’s almost unbelievable that it didn’t get this – it pulled up dictionary definitions for the word ‘founder!’ I am pretty certain that my cat knows who Microsoft’s founder is.
- “world’s largest lake” – The Caspian Sea! Even gave a list of the top five.

So we see, Wolfram Alpha is making big progress. But it’s still like waiting for artificial intelligence to be done.

Naturally while running a web business, you want to try to avoid stirring up a fight. But how do you know what’s going to start a fight? Obvious hot buttons like politics and religion are easy, but here we’re going to present a list of some of the more notorious web wars to give you an idea of just how touchy your audience can be. And if you disagree with any of these, please don’t threaten to drive by our office and throw bricks through the windows, OK? Friends?

The January, 2006 dispute between Ebaum’s World and YTMND over a Lindsey Lohan gif – one said they stole it from the other. It spilled over into many other forums, to the point where other sites began banning the mere mention of either website’s name.

Wikipedia edit wars. There’s a whole page on Wikipedia itself about them. Then add in the dispute over credibility, editor integrity, and top brass decisions. Whoo! Stand back.

Technology preferences. There have always been and will always be, wars over tech products and platforms. Web browsers, operating systems, programming languages, image editors, text editors, even video games. For just one example, on the Unix platform the text editors Emacs vs vi is a famous dispute that appears to be never-ending.

Will an airplane take off if its on a conveyor belt running in the opposite direction? A heated physics debate that’s still raging today, despite being busted in an episode of the TV show Mythbusters.

The Monty Hall Problem is such a classic argument in mathematic circles that it actually predates the Internet – the first appearance was in a newspaper column which inspired world-wide response.

What have we learned today? We have learned that people are very attached to their opinions. We’ll admit, right here on this site, we’re no different – everybody has a hot button. So we know before we take a broad stance on something, we should research it over the web and try to take extra caution if that topic tends to bring out the warriors.

TechDirt is digging up shovels full of information on ACTA. The agreement is set up to protect against the boom in global media piracy, but the problem is that it’s almost impossible to solve this problem without trampling on multiple human rights at the same time.

That’s why the organizations Consumers International, EDRi, the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ASIC (a French trade association for web 2.0 companies), and the Free Knowledge Institute have all banded together to protest the agreement and voice their concerns, or at least put on the breaks until cooler heads can have a look at this.

On Australian turf, the Australian Digital Alliance, Australian Library and Information Association, Choice (a non-profit consumer advocate), and the Internet Industry Association have formed a coalition stating much the same thing. In a package, reducing counterfeiting is important where it endangers consumer health or safety or constitutes commercial scale infringement is a good thing; but we shouldn’t have to roll heads to do it.

1. Microsoft once licensed a Unix-based operating system. It was called “Xenix” and was licensed from AT&T for Microsoft to redistribute. They eventually changed their minds and sold it to Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). This is ironic given that every competitor to Windows today is based on a Unix core.

2. Bill Gates’ parents originally didn’t plan on his going into computers. His father was a prominent lawyer, his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem, and his grandfather was a national bank president. So the family plan was for him to become a lawyer, too. Probably good he didn’t listen to them, huh?

3. Internet Explorer is a direct descendant of Spyglass Mosaic. The original Mosaic came from NCSA with Spyglass as its commercial licensing partner. Microsoft bought a copy of Mosaic from Spyglass and developed it into Internet Explorer.

4. Bill Gates’ personal programming resume includes “DONKEY.BAS.” This was a BASIC game written to test Microsoft’s BASIC interpreter. Microsoft was in fact originally only going to design programming languages, not operating systems.

5. A series of internal memos called “the Halloween Documents” details Microsoft’s corporate strategy against its open-source competitor Linux. They’re still published online here and there. They were unearthed during the US antitrust case. “Halloween” is a United States holiday celebrating ghosts, goblins, and spooky stuff, so it kind of fits.

6. Bill Gates and former US president George W. Bush are 8th cousins. That was determined by genealogist Dave Barrett. They both descended from Henry Whitney, who came from England to Long Island, NY, US, in 1635.

7. Microsoft employs “evangelists.” A technology evangelist is “a person who attempts to build a critical mass of support for a given technology in order to establish it as a technical standard in a market that is subject to network effects.” One such evangelist was James Plamondon, who spearheaded the campaign to get Microsoft’s first copy of Windows declared as the standard PC system.

8. Microsoft campus has its own annual Puzzle Hunt. It’s modeled after the famous Puzzle Hunt at MIT campus, Boston, US. For a day, employees scramble around hunting for clues, solving puzzles, and pitting their wits against engineers for a chance to locate a secret treasure hidden on the property.

9. Before trying to develop for IBM, Microsoft attempted to launch the MSX computer system. The standardized home computer architecture was introduced the 1980s, but was based in Japan. For a while there, the MSX was the de-facto gaming platform for Japanese gamers before the Nintendo came along. The MSX was never marketed much in the English-speaking world, however.

10. Microsoft Bob was Melinda French’s idea. Melinda spoke up between Windows 3.1 and Windows ’95 to ask for a more user-friendly system. Melinda was, at the time, Bill Gates’ girlfriend, and they only later married to have her become Melinda Gates. Good thing their marriage did better than Microsoft Bob did!

The article makes a comparison to the sense of a child who looks out the window, sees snow falling, and knows to go put on a coat before going outside. Now, a knowledge system would be able to make this connection given this simple rule: “If snow is falling outside, then it is cold.” The snow bit flips on the cold bit. However, even after we give the machine all of these rules to work with, it still wouldn’t match the reasoning of a human who can extrapolate new rules from other related rules.

Consider if you had an erupting volcano nearby and so lava was falling. Even if you’d never seen lava before or heard of a volcano, you’d look at the lava, smell the sulfer in the air, watch the screaming villagers running away from it, and conclude that whatever this new stuff is, it must be bad news. So maybe wear two coats before going out.

Not pictured: Yahoo! was started in a trailer on the campus of Stanford University! Certainly, they deserve some more juice than some teenager who draws MySpace backgrounds, don’t they?

One notable mention is PopCap games. If we may be so bold as to speculate, PopCap basically owes its success to being the first link you find on Sun Microsystem’s Java.com site after you’ve successfully downloaded and installed Java. Now trace the

psychology: you just installed Java, got it set up, and now need to test it. Hey, there’s a handy site right here! So you go there and it’s games! What a fun reward after the hard work of installing Java. Hey, this site is fun, think I’ll bookmark this!