FTC Targets Blogger Freebies

latimes.com/business/la-fi-bloggers6-2009oct06,0,4733519.story

The link above announces the FTC's long awaited rules concerning its crackdown on misleading endorsements by bloggers. "The post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement...." "Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service." Will this have any effect on Our Lady of the Perpetual Reviews, speed poster Harriet Klausner, and other of the notorious shills who infest - with the company's astonishing connivance - Amazon.com? Or is Amazon, as one insightful wit described it, now and forever "above the law?"

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Ed. note: a couple more related articles: (1) in the Financial Times and (2) from Yahoo Finance.

Question About Amazon Text Stats

I just found out about "text stats" at Amazon. The New York Times even wrote an article about them a couple years ago. But I can't find them when I look. Are text stats something Amazon once had, but discontinued? Anyone know?

I noticed Amazon started tagging reviews written by those who bought the book from them. Worth doing, I suppose. Not that it will help at all, but it's something.

Remember Lev Grossman? Turns out that...

Remember that article in Time by Lev Grossman? The one about "one of the world's most prolific and influential book reviewers" Harriet Klausner?

Turns out that the selfsame Lev Grossman is not just some journalist. Turns out that "Lev Grossman is a senior writer and book critic for TIME magazine". And we wondered why he would write such an article! Hmmm... :-)

Btw, turns out he's also an author. He's written three books (as far as I could see).
1. Codex
2. The Magicians: A Novel
3. Warp: A Novel

Check 'em out (don't forget the reviews).

All The Unnoticed "Helpfuls, Where Do they All Come From?

Am I alone in my bewilderment as to how Harriet's number of "helpful votes" is growing by leaps and bounds? Her "reviews" themselves within the last few years have never garnered a suspicious number of "helpfuls" as did, say, those of Grady Harp. In fact, she is winning such little favor among Amazon readers as to be on a definite downward spiral in the New Ratings System. On the other hand, her position as Number One Reviewer in the Classical (i.e. fraudulent) System is cemented, I suspect, not only by the continuing surreal proliferation of her "reviews" but by an unbelievable number of "helpful votes," presumably in the main on her older reviews. She's garnered more than 40 such within less than the last 24 hours. Now this is an easily overlooked phenomenon which, for my money, calls to mind Grady Harp's practices of old.

Because they can: Amazon deletes books from Kindles, remotely

Jeff Bezos apologizes (after being caught out):

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has issued an apology to Kindle customers after [books] were remotely deleted from their electronic readers.

"This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of '1984' and other novels on Kindle," the Amazon chief executive said in a post on Thursday on the Kindle Community discussion forum.

"Our 'solution' to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles [yeah! just look at the shills proliferating on the site! Harriet Klausner anyone? Six books a day for a decade, all five stars -- them are fancy principles, we know.]," Bezos wrote.

"It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received," he said. "We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission."

Bezos' apology came a week after unauthorized copies of "1984" and "Animal Farm" were wiped from Kindle readers in a move that triggered privacy concerns and drew unfavorable comparisons to Big Brother-like behavior.

Lessons learnt: they can do it. Kindle-loving dumbos paid over two hundred dollars for someone to be able to keep tabs on them, congratulations. That's why I will never buy a Kindle or Kindle-like device (in addition to the cost of it). That is also why the new Google OS will be a flop. No one needs someone else's hands in one's pockets.

Justice At Last?

Newspapers recently have reported that the FTC plans late this summer to begin requiring bloggers and websites to identify all entries which have been written for compensation - i.e. by covert shills.

A typical newspaper article pointing this out is the following: http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bal-blogging-0622,0,1923444.story.

The proposed FTC guidelines may be viewed at http://www.ftc.gov/os/2008/11/P034520endorsementguides.pdf




My worry is that, if such regs are enforced, Amazon.com stars such as Harriet Klausner and Grady Harp may lose their inspiration to keep on publishing endless streams of ill-written, meaningless reviews, thus depriving us all of unparalled sources of merriment.

Publishing giant Elsevier in hot water over hiring shills

From the BBC News Magazine:

... the recent actions of science publisher Elsevier caused a storm. The firm offered a $25 (£15) Amazon voucher to academics who contributed to the textbook Clinical Psychology if they would go on Amazon [...] and give it five stars.

The perils of five-star reviews by Finlo Rohrer. I hope Jeff "Customer Reviews" Bozos doesn't neglect to read this piece.

And of course:

"Amazon works hard to maintain the integrity of its customer reviews," a spokesman says. "We have very clear guidelines, and when a customer reports a review that they feel is inappropriate, we investigate, and may (or may not) take it down."

Yes we believe that, just look at Amazon No.1 Top Reviewer, Harriet Klausner, who has on average been posting, what, six-to-ten reviews every day since 1999? Does anyone believe that she actually reads six-to-ten books a day, and that these hastily thrown together by way of cribbing from the jacket "reviews" -- error-ridden, opinion-free, incoherent and ungrammatical but always positive -- can be anything other than a brazen shill's trying to hornswoggle the reading public into buying the stuff? Many people emailed Amazon about this without getting back as little as acknowledgment of receipt! Anything else Amazon responds to quickly and specifically, but shilling on their site appears to be an issue Amazon doesn't want to know about. But wait, there's more:

"One of the things Amazon have is a question did you find this review helpful - reviews are ranked," says Neill [Graeme Neill of industry magazine The Bookseller]. "I wouldn't underestimate the humble customer's ability to distinguish between what is a gushing press release and a genuine 'I felt this book was fantastic'."

Yeah, and I would also not underestimate the shills' ability to get in cahoots and use this helpful/not-helpful voting capability to vote for on another and against their detractors -- especially since one of those inexplicable operational nuances of Amazon site's software which, while never openly described, just seem always to empower the shill and disable the customer, is that ON AMAZON ANYONE [literally] CAN VOTE -- AND ANY NUMBER OF TIMES AT THAT. While a purchase is required in order to post reviews or comments, nothing is required in order to vote: type in any garbage into the account-creation-page fields and you're in business. This, most likely, is how shills self-vote and conduct their negging campaigns retaliating against their detractors. Notice that realistically, Mr Casual Visitor won't use this capability: he doesn't know it exists, he won't bother organising with others, he won't spend the time needed to manipulate the site, and so on. Somehow Amazon's software always works in a way that gives power to the shill. Amazon's never stipulating the actual rules of anything on their site works this way too (imo). So... let's be honest: Amazon sells stuff, shills push the selfsame stuff, so how many PhD's do you need to connect two and two together here? "Amazon works hard to maintain the integrity" my ass.