I had almost forgotten this gem, which I had dutifully (and neatly) torn from the newspaper, folded and placed in my satchel, where it lay undiscovered until now. Once again I am unashamedly showing my Luddite tendancies, but no matter - unlike many I still prefer the old-fashioned hard copy. As previously noted, it's also a lot easier to annotate, and I find much less taxing on the eyes to read (small serif font and all). Anyway, the article in question was from The Weekend Australian, and it tells of a (seemingly ethical) PR firm in the US which said it had been engaged by Facebook to pretty much do everything it could to (legally) slander online rival Google. The campaign was carried out by placing negative stories about Google in newspapers, magazines and of course, online.
Interestingly, the story became public when the PR firm approached a blogger offering assistance to get his negative Google stories published in the mainstream print media. The blogger then made the email trail between him and said PR firm public (via his blog, of course) and voila!
But what is more than a little disturbing is the fact that the PR firm only owned up to this nefarious behaviour after the issue became public. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't hire this mob to do PR for my next garage sale, especially if they set the ethical bar this low.
And Facebook's response, when they finally had to admit responsibility, was like something you would get from a government department which wanted to do everything possible to obfuscate the answer - Sir Humphrey Appleby would have been proud of it (seriously - have a read). No mea culpa here, more like 'whatever'.
I for one cannot feel a modicum of sympathy for any party involved here - it's clearly all about power, control and money. If you have seen the movie Social Network, you too may gotten the feeling that Facebook's founder is possibly a semi-autistic sociopath (the above perhaps being proof) - do we really want someone like this having so much influence in the world? (and one of the many reasons I steadfastly do not facebook - I prefer my friends real, thanks).
As for Google...gosh...where to start? Suffice it to say that we have all been unwittingly sucked in by their apparent largesse - which is actually just a very disingenuous (at best) offer of online philanthropy, which is still nothing better than a base attempt to gain the biggest slice of market share.
It all comes back to the online world not turning out to be that free and inclusive democracy which was envisioned. Sadly, it has just become a virtual reflection of the real world we live in.
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