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Take a look at this CNET News commentary by John Palfrey and Jonathan Zittrain on the StopBadware project and how it intends to use feedback from real human beings. I'm surprised more of us are not outraged at "malicious software that subverts your computer's operations for the benefit of a third party," as the authors put it.
ePostal News mentions StopBadware.org, a project WebWatch advises, in the body of a story on eBay's purchase of Estonian wild-child Internet voice-com startup Skype. The article doesn't have that much to do with what WebWatch does, but we appreciate the mention:
"By the way, the new Google, Sun and Lenovo-sponsored StopBadware.org effort put together by Harvard Law School, Oxford and Consumer Reports has found that Kazaa "misleadingly advertises itself as spyware-free, does not completely remove all components during the uninstall process, interferes with computer use, and makes undisclosed modifications to other software...Kazaa is first among the four worst offenders that the self-styled"Neighborhood Watch"-like StopBadware has put on its black list. The others are Mediapipe, SpyAxe and Waterfalls 3."
Of course, eBay's $2.6 billion purchase of Skype has got to be looking a little painful right now considering the legal troubles of its founders, who built Kazaa...
The best show on television right now (besides House) is Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America. Each episode, the hot-tempered chef (who always manages to include a scene in which he takes his shirt off to change into chef garb) drops into a restaurant in dire straits. He eats a meal, watches how the kitchen works, observes the customers, then tries to figure out how to fix what's broken and keep the restaurant from shuttering its doors.
In honor of Gordon Ramsay (whose company is about to open a restaurant in New York -- alas, a bit out of the UnSponsored Link staff's budget and transportation range), we're going to start an occasional feature called, perhaps derivatively, WebWatch's Web Site Nightmares, in which we name a site we think needs some serious work. We'll make some suggestions. Hopefully, we won't wind up in court, as Ramsay frequently does. (Actually, Consumer Reports' record of legal victories is pretty impressive).
We'll open up the process to nominations, and if we don't get any, we'll post our own choice here in about three weeks.
Linda Burbank mentions WebWatch in this USA Today story posted Wednesday. If you've had a problem with "fare-jumping" on the major travel Web sites -- and I know many of you have, because you have been writing to us about it -- you should read some of the unique research we've done on the topic the last couple of years, then let's hear some ideas from you as to what WebWatch might be able to do about it. We have considered removing one of the major travel aggregators from our list of sites that have pledged to uphold our credibility guidelines, then calling attention to that in the press.
But it seems the problem is not limited to one site, nor to one type of site, i.e., travel aggregators like Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity, but also to direct-sell sites of airlines like Frontier. So let us know what you think, and if you have a horror story, post it here.
By the way, in trying to book tickets for my own vacation to Egypt, coming up in a couple of weeks, I had a good experience with the Best Travel Store site. The English is a little awkward, which is often a warning sign, but I was able to get a good deal on airline tickets, beating any offerings from the big three mentioned above. Actually, Orbitz did keep returning a really cheap fare over several days, on Turkish Airlines, but it was impossible to book. I kept getting told the fare was no longer available, or that the price had gone up. It's tempting to single out Orbitz here, as I have had similar problems many times before trying to book international flights -- but not fair, because I had the same problem on BTS with a really cheap fare on Ukrainian Airlines. Also BTS appears to be a "bucket shop" consolidator, so be prepared to go offline to complete the deal.
Read this report just out from the European Union's Citizen Advice Bureau. And make sure you read some of the supplementary stuff on this site, including tip sheets. The report notes a 74 percent increase in the "total number of complaints received by those ECC's who featured in the 2004 report," as the press release rather awkwardly puts it. Delivery problems rank at the top, along with receiving defective goods, and general unpleasant behavior among Web traders. Dig a bit deeper on this site, as some of the news reports today, such as this from one of WebWatch's favorite news sites, don't really tell the story well.
Those of you watching last night's Stanley Cup final between the Edmonton Oilers and Carolina Hurricanes (yes, they were the once-proud Hartford Whalers) may have noticed a Web site URL printed on the boards behind the goal: AsthmaControl.com. Go there and you'll see a five-question quiz to help determine whether you have asthma, and if so, whether it's "under control." You go through the quiz, then you get a prompt to print the results out for your doctor. Just remember AsthmaControl.com, despite its altruistic-sounding name, is a GlaxoSmithKline advertisement. In the business this is called a "soft-sell" drug ad, because no drug is mentioned and the sales pitch is wrapped in warm fuzziness. GlaxoSmithKline makes Advair, a top-selling asthma drug. In February, the company reported booming sales for Advair. (This is from a British newspaper, so multiply the pounds figure of 6.7 billion by about 2 and you get $12 billion in sales overall, $6 billion for Advair).
There's another classic soft-sell on TV these days. You may have seen a commercial with lots of cheerful, happy vignettes in warm colors talking about creating a community for people afflicted with what Madison Avenue once called "the heartbreak of psoriasis" (there's no cure). The TV commercial mentions the Web site "Psoriasis Connect" and there's a glossy quarterly magazine floating around with a slightly different name, "Psoriasis Connections," which you can subscribe to on the Web site should you be so inclined. The Web site features a picture of a presumably healthy caucasian mother and her smiling son gazing into each other's eyes. The site's text is reassuring and empathetic, encouraging you to connect with experts "and people like you." You can even sign up and surrender your personal information to the companies that own the site, Amgen and Wyeth, so they can keep you up to date about how to buy Enbrel, their drug for your condition. (Should you crave a straight-ahead approach intended for doctors, skip the happy colors and pictures and go to Enbrel.com.) Says industry trade PharmaLive: "Enbrel sales generated the strongest growth among the entire industry's top 25 global prescription products in 2005. Worldwide sales of the drug reached $3.66 billion in 2005, an increase of 42% compared with 2004."
So obviously the ad campaigns are working, and I'm not making a judgment against them. You should read this paper by the Media Education Foundation (Noam Chomsky alert! He's on their board of advisers) to think that through. What I am saying is: Read the fine print. You have to scroll to the bottom of AsthmaControl.com and PsoriasisConnect.com to find the corporate logos and ownership statements. Sites like these may contain valuable and helpful information, but realize: Their intent is to sell you a drug. They want you to go to your doctor and ask for whatever drug it is they are selling. Big pharma's direct-to-consumer marketing has been controversial to the degree an industry trade group put forward a set of "guiding principles" for content.
Medical science accepts diversity of opinion about many things. There is probably more than one treatment for whatever problem you have, and it may not be in pill form. Get information about it from an unbiased source that's not trying to sell you something. If you need information on unbiased information sources, look here.
On Friday June 9 I went to the Hyperlinked Society conference at U. Penn's Annenberg School. The field of topics was rich. The term "link literacy" emerged from one of the panels and it's an important one to explore. Over the years we have studied how consumers perceive links and, specifically, terms Web sites use to label them. What's clear is many people don't understand what's a paid link and what's not.
First, let's be clear about something. When it comes to online and print -- magazines, and to a lesser degree newspapers -- advertisers looooove the idea their ad might fool readers into thinking it's a piece of "editorial content," i.e., something written by a journalist and read by an editor and therefore, representative of objective fact.
When you see the commerce department of the Tanzanian government take out a five-page ad in Newsweek magazine about how wired for business Dar es Salaam is, you'll see words at the top of each page in probably small but still legible print saying something like, "SPECIAL ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT." The rules of the publishing game (which are, as you may not expect, subject to widespread interpretation and largely unknown to the reading public) say the label should be there, and that the supplement can't appear in the magazine's table of contents.
Now, in print publications lower on the food chain than Newsweek, where publishers care less about credibility (or readers) than ad dollars -- I'm talking about trade publishing -- relationships with advertisers are chummy, and editorial standards more malleable.
Unfortunately, because ad dollars were scarce for a long time, Web publishing has grown up closer to the trade press model. Even mainstream media got excited for a while about how this new medium was going to help erode the troublesome, unprofitable barriers of the old.
So where this is going is: Advertisers know readers are confused -- they're counting on it. Big-media Web sites are playing along. That's why you see advertising sections on big mainstream news sites labeled as "marketplace," "special section," "partner center" and other silly euphemisms.
You can bet anything labeled "sponsored link," "featured link," "special partners," "featured partners" and other permutations means, "paid ad." Plain and simple. Those of us who've been in media a while find this painfully obvious. But a lot of plain folks who use the Web don't understand it, advertisers know it, and publishers are helping to exploit the confusion.
The Internet's revolutionary ability to foster the free exchange of ideas has more than a few governments lashing back in a desperate attempt to control the medium.
Amnesty International recently launched a campaign, "Irrepressible.Info," to highlight and combat this growing technological oppression, which it describes thusly:
"Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information. The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments - with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world - are cracking down on freedom of expression."
To learn more, visit Irrepressible.Info