The developers and promoters for the Soho Italia project have set up their own blog to counter the critical coverage and commentary they have been getting in the media and blog world. It’s at http://sohoitaliablog.com/ Unfortunately, you cannot elect to keep informed of exciting new posts and drooling interviews with the architect as there are no subscriber or feed options.
They don’t actually own up to being behind the blog, but it’s pretty obvious they are, it contains their advertisements, discount opportunities to buy their condos, and very carefully selected media exerpts. One odd word of ownership creeps in …
Over the years I have run this blog I have only had to block a few comments. One was clearly an advert, another from a looney (who at least could read…). But today I got a whole bunch of comments, one on every Soho Italia post already up, each comment gushes about the condo, its height, its beauty … and conveniently provides a link to the tame blog. This must be a term for this sort of stealth marketing. I call it Tommy rot.
Reminds me of George Guirguis’ social media campaign in the last municipal election. Except less funny stuff about Jesus.
Did the posts you’d filtered have sentences that ended in double exclamation marks, like the comments on the posts on sohoitalia.blogspot.com ?
Would love to see a few of those “black ops” comments get approved. Nothing like opening up the curtains to let in the light of day, so we can all see what the spinners are up to.
You can always wedge your own comment in above or below, just to intro the bogus comment, and set context.
Evan: i let one or two in, for fun. Tommyrot.
Alex: not all of them had two exclamation marks !!
CAM: I had forgotten about those nightmare emails from hell, oops, George, that could not be stopped.
There is a RSS link at the bottom of the page: .
Even if the link wasn’t there, blogspot feed URLs are predictable. See for example.
Sorry for the malformed tags in that last. The feed URL is: .
The help document describing how to construct blogspot feed URLs is:.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
Astroturfing is a form of advocacy often in support of a political or corporate agenda designed to give the appearance of a “grassroots” movement. The goal of such campaigns is to disguise the efforts of a political and/or commercial entity as an independent public reaction to some political entity—a politician, political group, product, service or event. The term is a derivation of AstroTurf, a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to look like natural grass.
Astroturfers attempt to orchestrate the actions of apparently diverse and geographically distributed individuals, by both overt (“outreach”, “awareness”, etc.) and covert (disinformation) means. Astroturfing may be undertaken by an individual promoting a personal agenda, or highly organized professional groups with money from large corporations, unions, non-profits, or activist organizations. Very often, the efforts are conducted by political consultants who also specialize in opposition research. Beneficiaries are not “grass root” campaigners but distant organizations that orchestrate such campaigns.
Visited the blog (surprise, surprise), but I just assumed they owned up to being behind it because it was so obvious. I don’t think anyone should be upset over the major players forming a blog where they are the only ones talking and creating content. It is what it is. The interweb is a wild, wooly place.
On an unrelated note – is Guirguis still contesting the election results?
Sorry, missed something – While I support everyone’s right to have a blog (excluding celebrities), I have to say I do not support what you describe in the latter part of your post. Blanketing another blog with comments aimed at spreading the link to your own blog is cheap and dumb. That’s kid’s stuff, and way out of line.
I posted a couple of gently critical comments on the blog to see first if they would be posted and second what kind of response they would generate. Nothing offensive, just devil’s advocate type of thing.