How much is your reputation worth?

Well, if you’re Belkin (manufacturer of computer cables and accessories) it may not be worth much now. According to The Consumerist, a Belkin representative has been caught trying to get users to post 5 star ratings on his company’s products on Amazon, Buy.com and Newegg. Apparently, a few Belkin products were getting lacklustre reviews, so he offered cash in exchange for good reviews.

While it may not signify the entire company is ethically bankrupt, it is clear that at least one employee is trying to artificially inflate the company’s reputation. This is an obvious case of poor ethical judgement, but it’s a case of fraud too.

As if that wasn’t crazy enough, this representative used Amazon’s own Mechanical Turk service (where companies post menial jobs that humans do better than machines) to attract potential commenters. Didn’t they imagine what would happen if they got caught? Appearing on The Consumerist blog is not generally a good thing. Damage control time.

Read more on the story here.

Wikipedia turns 8

The great encyclopedia experiment turns 8 this week. Wikipedia, everyone’s popular source of quick information (even those who say the information isn’t reliable, use it – trust me).  There are problems with the system (reliability, vandalism, bias, etc.), but with over 2.6 million articles in English (and counting) it is certainly a force to be reckoned with.

For many Wikipedia represents all that is wrong with the Internet (think: The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen), but I think for astute observers it signifies a fundamental shift. A shift in which sharing information is more important than hoarding it; where being transparent and open solves problems instead of creating anarchy. Perhaps this experiment in radical trust can teach us more than just how to amass knowledge… we’ll see.

On any given week, you can find Jimmy Wales talking about Wikipedia to various news outlets. Here’s the article that I just read from CBC.

The new face(book) of job action

As you may know York University has been on strike for about 10-weeks now. Obviously, strikes are not fun for anyone, but school strikes are particularly bad for students (especially students who pay thousands in tuition). Usually the administration and the striking employee groups say that they want to get the students back to class as quickly as possible, but often the students are used in the negotiations (ever wonder why faculty don’t strike in the summer?)

Recently, I’ve read a number of articles about students weighing in on the issue. What’s interesting is that students are self-organizing with their favourite tool – Facebook (are we really surprised?). This changes the game somewhat – after all, if enough students join these Facebook protest groups, the two sides have to listen… right?

Somewhere Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody) is smiling, this is yet another example of people organizing without organizations…