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.

Comments

if you want to be taken seriously in the dog eat dog world of poltical blogs you need to stop being lonewacko and start being something that says polished, professional, intelligent.

Yeah, like every other anonymous political pundit? The insinuation that this blog is not intelligent is an insult. Most of the mainstream blogs are full of shit written by morons. Give it a rest, or go write your own blog.

old news the system is corrupt. we all know that the system is totally corrupt so whats new? the system will soon be in a total economic collapse but the pigs in office will tell you "its ok all is well", as you are told to walk into some camp system, the fact is most of you want to live inside a camp system and would run into the gates happy to see ovens waiting for you, its called Brainwashing. and face facts people its all part of the plan of the pigs in power.

I suspect that "Rita Howards" is actually Ken Mehlmann. However, it has a point: the domain name - originally refering to solo hiking - is a bit of an impediment and thus I will be concentrating a bit more on my other sites with less confusing names.

Psst... upwards of 60 million people voted for President Barack Hussein Obama II. When some of these people get online and express their opinion, _that doesn't make them sockpuppets._ It makes them citizens of this great republic participating in public discourse on a topic which should be of interest to everybody. You think it's "suspicious" that three white women in their 50s all commented in the same place? Let me give you a little astroturfing ProTip: the point of sockpuppetry is to pretend to be _other people_. An actual sock puppeter would have presented his or her self in very different guises.