Monday, January 14, 2008

Please revisit this familiar link (hilarious)

We've already linked to this article, but there's a new comment there, at the very bottom, a hilarious one. I'll quote a tiny bit:
[...] Over at my website, SF Reviews.Net, a pleasant little hobby, I have a Forum. One day about two years ago, I logged on to discover that, in the space of a half hour, Harriet Klausner had dropped by, sniffed around like a dog looking for a good place to mark, and flooded the Forum with no fewer than 50 of her “reviews.” Then she had evidently moved on. [...]
This is written by someone called Thomas M. Wagner. Enjoy!

8 comments:

Cathy said...

Love it! How can anyone really believe one person is writing and posting those reviews everywhere?

PS, I noticed a brief mention on the Amazon DB's where someone stated that multiple peoples posting on one account could not be ranked. They even intimated that Amazon shudders at the thought of HK being caught in the act the the subsequent fall out.

Oh, for an enterprising reporter who could get to the bottom of it all!

Malleus said...

Yes, it's gotta be one person: that's how 'Gunny' got defrocked: he'd admitted that he doesn't read them books and that 'at last count' there was a small army of scribblers posting under his name.

The most noxious 'collective' reviewer on Amazon is 'Midwest Book Reviews': they claim to be about 40 people; their reviews are even worse than Harriet's -- one-paragraph content summary + five-stars. ALWAYS five stars. They review over a hundred books a day -- which, btw, even for 40 people, exceeds Harriet's proclaimed speed of reading of two books a day. Check them out, it's instructive. Apparently, this, too, violates no Amazon rules. They have reviewed over 35,000 books! Surely they read them all...

Cathy said...

Ah, but as long as they're not "ranked" they aren't violating guidelines as I understand it.

I'm still waiting for the reporter who can break the HK story. Wouldn't that rock the world?

Cathy said...

malleus, I had a thought last night whilst tossing and turning. The guy on the blogger mentioned HK's IP and blocking it. Wouldn't it be interesting to look up that IP on a whois search and find out where it's from? I mean, if the IP that dumpsed those 50 reviews came from India that could really rock the Amazon world, wouldn't it?

Malleus said...

Cathy, you should be a private investigator :-) , I think you got the necessary gifts for that. That's true, it'd be great fun if the 'Harriet Klausner' IP address turned out to be in Mumbai somewhere... 'course, most likely, she'd ignore the discovery and went on like nothing happened, or she could say she used a proxy in Mumbai -- just to keep safe from those terrible detactors, you know, those people envious of her success.

Cathy said...

malleus, I am a credit manager which in theory = detective. Try chasing contractors for a living and you'll see what I mean :-)

I still think a foreign IP would be deadly if it was exposed. Sigh...

Malleus said...

:-) Credit manager! That explains it.

Cathy said...

You should see when a group of us from the suppliers get together. Oh my, talk about a room full of barracudas (sp?). Ah, the stories we can tell of crooked contractors it would curl your toes :-)