January 21, 2008

Allez Obama! (the blogs are alive with sock puppets)

There seem to be a large number of sock puppets (per Wikipedia an "online identity used for purposes of deception within an Internet community") running loose on various blog sites and leaving comments supporting various candidates such as Barack Obama, Mike Huckabee, and occasionally others. Now, certainly, many or most of those supporters might not be socks, but it's awful strange to find at least three white women around 50 years of age who suddenly showed up at a thread by Atlantic blogger Marc Ambinder about a Barack Obama speech and identified themselves by their race, gender, and age and indicated their support for the speech.

An even odder example comes from September of last year at the barely-visited TAPPED (link), also about an Obama speech:

The tide is starting to swell.The coal is getting stoked. The blinders are being removed. The chant of a few is becoming a chorus of thousands.People all over this country are learning that there is still hope for our great country.Obama 2008.

Odd, very odd.

All of these remind me of many things, but most of all this bit of pro-Sun Microsystems propaganda from 1997, about a developer's meeting where things (according to the account) went south for their rival, Microsoft (link):

You would not believe it but the crowd started booing and hissing [at the Microsoft presenter], granted that it wasn't a smart thing to do, and then silence again even on a bewildered stage, until somebody yelled "Go Java!" (which in french sounds like: "Allez Java!") and the whole room started cheering and applauding... the guys on stage physically stepped back and were obviously stunned that it would backfire like that.

It was beautiful.

And then the people started leaving the room, at first one by one and then massively over the course of an hour. The guy on stage could not believe his eyes and the poor devil couldn't find his words, he was actually pathetic when he squirmished a "I have to finish this..." as people were leaving right under his nose.

Someone from Sun also posted a doubly-forwarded tale from an unnamed student of an unnamed professor about installing Microsoft's competitor to Java on his laptop, leaving it inoperable. Despite the fact that these were clearly either outright lies or highly inflated accounts, many people seem to have bought them.

Posted to Politics at January 21, 2008 10:29 PM