Monday, July 28, 2008

Generating empty buzz

By way of Mr Wind comes a link. Mr Wind & I work together. The link that Mr Wind sent me contains an article that mentions my current employer and, more importantly, is authored by a consulting company both Mr Wind & I had the pleasure of working with in the past. Pleasure, of course, is a relative term. Like everything else in life it depends on its environs. I shouldn't digress.

To me the article (which is a part of a blog) appears to have been a random translation of a random white paper from English into some intermediate language and then back into English. Mr Wind has a far more interesting theory that the blog entry was generated by stringing together sentences using a fancy algorithm (whose name escapes me) that chains expression instances based on its perception of how they relate to each other. Mr Wind is wicked smart. No joke. It is true.

In either case, the blog seems to exist for one reason. It links to and therefore promotes other most definitely auto-generated blogs which in turn point back at it. It is a network of auto-generated blogs full of buzzwords and advertisements. The fact that they are connected makes their Google ranks go up. So when you search Google about the aforementioned consulting company or anything else that appears on the pages the blog in question come up higher in the ranks. It is mo' better hits... Bill Hicks was right:

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