CSotD: Edumacating the Masses
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As a tool for awakening the masses, this is probably hopeless.
But Tom the Dancing Bug at least gets credit for sticking a sharp stick in Facebook's ribs.
Yes, there are click farms organized to boost the visibility of their clients' posts. However, while giving Facebook money to advertise your products is a waste, there is plenty of value for scammers in click farming.
The flaw in Bolling's argument (well, Junior's argument) is that good click farming does still work and is independent of Facebook's ad programs.
I suspect Bolling is reacting to the lack of visibility of things people have actively asked to see. I've got over 600 people who "like" CSotD's Facebook page, but often have only 50 or 75 people who "see" a post there. And paying to promote a posting raises that number but has no impact on site visits.
I get slight jumps from shares on Facebook and much larger jumps by mentions on external blogs. Paying Facebook, however, is a waste of money.
However, I also suspect he simply has too many intelligent, net-savvy people among his "friends," because the rest of us are seeing enough gullibility in our feeds to make a Nigerian widow drool.
And, like most scams, Billy the Kitty's deal doesn't require every real reader to see Billy, as long as it gets through to a fair number who will click on the link to go to Billy the Kitty's web site.
At that point, that fact will be shared with their friends and, even with Facebook tweaking who sees what, Billy does indeed get more views.
Best of all is if those people are gullible enough to agree to let Billy have access to their contacts — and note that it doesn't require you to be that foolish. All it takes for you to have your information harvested is for you to be foolish enough to be friends with someone that gullible.
Thanks, sweet old Aunt Edna.
The problem is, 99 percent of the people who will ever figure that out have already figured it out: Anything that says you'll be "shocked" and "you won't believe" is bogus.
And a picture of a girl with exposed cleavage has nothing to do with learning a second language, nor are they going to show you anything more than you've already seen, pendejo.
We are told that 24 percent of Americans think the Sun goes around the Earth and, if you have any slightly dotty friends and relatives among your Facebook friends, well, to put it another way, if only 24 percent of drivers thought it perfectly acceptable to throw their McDonald's bags out the windows of their cars …
Case in point:
You know what I miss? Back at the dawn of time, when email was the primary way of circulating clueless nonsense, there was a flare-up of teachers trying to play a sort of Flat Stanley game on-line.
It was short-lived because, while you could have taught them about geometric progressions without annoying a lot of people simply with the old chessboard-and-wheat-grains story, the email projects also taught two other important things:
1. There is such a thing as netiquette, and purposely creating pointless clutter is poor netiquette and provokes furious responses from people, which you may never see because …
2. If you ask people in a geometric progression to respond to you by email, your school's server will crash and your teacher will likely learn something as well, at least from the principal if not from the board of education.
Those were known as the Good Old Days.
Granted, bandwidth is no longer the issue it once was, and the fact that these kids (who, as it happens, are Canadian, so don't get too smug up there) have, as of this morning, received 16,350 comments and 41,517 shares and 3,682 likes is not going to blow up their parents' connection or their school's or anyone else's.
So there's no harm done, dammit.
Just as, if the person sitting next to you on the bus hasn't bathed since the Ford administration, there's also no actual harm. If you find it annoying, well, that's just you being judgmental, I guess.
However, if it's hopeless to try to make people smarter, this represents a good effort to spread the stupidity.
A: It's not a science project. It's a math project. It's not even a good math project because it calls for a prediction based on … wild guesses?
B: How on earth are a pair of 10-year-olds going to monitor the feedback on 41,517 shares? This is before we get to "what are they going to do with the data?"
C: But, yeah, how were they planning to analyze even the 16,350 comments from people intelligent enough to know where to comment?
Pins on a map?
Percentage of responses from in-state, out-of-state, out-of-nation?
Maybe they were going to check the time-stamps on each comment and then plot them to confirm or refute a hypothesized relationship between distance from point of origin and time of response. Which wouldn't exist, but I'd like to see the resulting graphic as done by 10-year-olds.
My prediction is that they'll lose the blue ribbon to the kids who predicted where the next earthquake will strike by spinning a globe and then throwing darts at it.
And I'm sending this guy over to their house
This Is Priceless always gets at least a chuckle. Today, it got a giggle.
You probably already know this, but …
I would certainly be remiss if I didn't pass along the first piece of comic art from Bill Watterson in umpty-bump years, which is for the documentary "Stripped," about the current status of comics.
As noted before, the nearly-completed film was screened at the Billy Wilder gathering in November. I said then that I thought it was geared towards comics fans, but that's pretty much how documentaries work, I think. And if you're reading this blog, you're enough of a comic fan that this should be on your "must" list.
And now you can go download it at iTunes. Find out what was such a good project that the reclusive creator of "Calvin and Hobbes" not only agreed to be interviewed (off-camera, but on tape) for it, but decided to design the cover art.
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