Advertisment for a paid Internet troll position
From time to time the question arises as to whether or not there are paid trolls working the liberal blogs. One argument against is always that there are no such things as paid trolls period, whether on political blogs or elsewhere.
Here is a flat-out advertisement on Craigslist for a paid trolling position.
Since this will disappear fairly soon, I have also captured a bit of it below:
$1000/month to blog! - top users on digg, technorati, reddit, etcReply to: job-xxxxx@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-08-21, 10:00AM PDT
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WE ARE LOOKING FOR AN EXPERT USER OF DIGG, TECHNORATI, DEL.ICIO.US, SLASHDOT, REDDIT, FURL, MYSPACE, FACEBOOK, ETC.
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ABOUT THIS PROJECT
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You will be working as an independent contractor for two companies: one is Public Interest. The other is Michael Franzini.
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For Public Interest, your task will be to build online "buzz" about The Knight News Challenge.
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For Michael Franzini, your task will be to build online buzz about his book, One Hundred Young Americans.
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Basically, we want to get as much attention as we can all over the Internet for both of these.
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When you Google terms relevant to either of these, we want to come up with a ton of (content-rich) relevant hits.
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And we want to rise to the top of the Google search rankings as a result of all the sites linking to us.
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Some of this work will just entail getting people to link to us. It could be as simple as getting people to put a link on their MySpace page (especially people with tons of friends).
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But it could also mean writing in-depth posts on all kinds of sites to draw people in.
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We are looking for someone who has a proven track record of getting attention in the blogosphere and beyond. For example, if you are a top user on Digg, that definitely qualifies you.
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The basic requirement will be 150 stories a month, some of which need to be in-depth. We'll pay a bonus for stories that get a lot of attention. We're also open to figuring out some combination of blog posts and MySpace/Facebook/etc links each month.
While this is somewhat different than the kind of trolls we've seen here, it certainly raises at least the possibility of campaigns paying people to stir up trouble and play cheerleader for the candidate. Although they'd be silly to advertise the position on Craig's list!
Digg has always had allegations of paid operatives. Here's an article from Assignment Zero, published on Wired, an interview with someone in the business of gaming the Digg system.
"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani
August 21, 2007 6:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
PS -- great catch, by the way. And thank you for saving this for posterity!
August 21, 2007 6:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Agreed, a great catch.
August 21, 2007 8:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Google gaming is the new growth industry, apparently. Dem organizers take note.
Thanks for spotting this. BTW, you should be able to edit the title (sp).
August 22, 2007 7:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks - I didn't think I could edit after the first comment had been posted. Title should be fixed; I will call it a Yglesias moment.
sPh
August 22, 2007 8:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
Comments will be fixed after reply, but blogs are always open for edit.
August 22, 2007 8:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
I would advise against gaming Google from websites, because they are devoutly faithful believers in the righteousness of autonomy for both their bots and algorithms. If your gaming becomes targeted by newly tweaked processes out of Google: you will go directly to the sandbox, you will not pass go, you will not collect $200.
I also believe that Google search records have been insulated fairly well from being from being skewed in cross-site linking. The best methods to acquire Google JuJu are the old-fashioned ways: publish unique content that net users desire to access; do not engage in superfluous linking; and learn to use the no follow anchor tag.
A site's inbound links always have a value that is greater than zero. If they originate from a crappy site, the value will be almost zero though. Outbound links are from a different dimension though, they can and will be used against you in page ranking, and website managers should resist their tawdry urges by not linking promiscuously to content of vacuity.
August 29, 2007 10:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
If a person is:
There is a high probability that this person is also a Sans-a-Life Luser, but if this person has even an inkling about the free market, they would understand that $1000/month in return for an employer's exploitation of your expertsise is a steeply discounted compensation package, that does not reflect a free-market economy.
If you haven't done it already, you really should forward the ad to Google. They do not hold in high regard persons attempting to jack their most holy algorithms for PR hype. I just checked, and as I suspected, Craig's list is cached by Google
Michael Franzini is a principle for Public Interest; a a 501(c)3 nonprofit Ad Agency. That is one ridiculous concept, but it looks as if it was properly pitched to some cash heavy charities; a subset of those are members in the vanity genre. The website itself has a better than decent minimalist external design, that is then immediately degraded by being tossed into a dysfunctional implementation inside a major league flash envelope that suffers from some very basic controller flaws (I'd wager the design was done on an Apple only, with no thorough cross-browser testing); they default to invisible, are not statically placed, and float around a bit in the same general area, depending how many are needed for each individual function call.
I browsed through a bit of their publicly displayed past product. I did not leave the site with a conviction that this group actually possesses youth culture expertise. I did leave with an afterimage of LA Valley progeny of corporate media admin and celebrity agency handlers, who finished their art degrees without bright shinning prospects, and are using this non-profit vehicle for self-hyping career boosterism. Check out the AFI clip, and tell me if you believe it would effectively target present-day youth
Harper Collins is the publisher of the Franzini book mentioned in the ad. Amusingly, at the website of a Harper/Collins subsidiary, Collins Design, on their page for this book, a bio blurb about Franzini says:
Jacking a corporation hand that fed him? That's potentially exceedingly ill-advised misbehaving, because Sergey Brin is everywhere...he knows when you've been sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sakes...and be not afraid, because Google is your friend, and everyone over there promised to do no evil.
August 29, 2007 10:29 PM | Reply | Permalink