The US Marines And The Mormons Are Buying Votes On Digg?

from the say-what-now? dept

The LA Times has a short story on one of a bunch of companies that claims to be able to let you buy votes on Digg (as well as some other sites, but Digg is apparently the main attraction). There have been a bunch of such companies over the years, but what caught my eye was the claim in the article that among the customers of this particular company were the US Marines, the Mormon Church and the Korean Dept. of Tourism. Perhaps I don't follow the Digg spamming world that closely, but I'd mainly assumed that it was focused on random publications or no-name companies incorrectly believing that getting onto the front page of Digg would boost the company into the big time. But the US Marines and the Mormon Church? That seems really odd. Oh, and as for the claims that if you get on the front page of Digg it can send tens of thousands of visitors to your site in a matter of hours... don't buy into the hype. Over the past few years we've been on Digg's front page a bunch of times and it certainly drives a nice stream of traffic, but never more than a few thousand visitors (sometimes significantly less). It's always nice when one of our stories makes it, but I can't see how the amount of traffic Digg drives could possibly be worth the rates this company supposedly charges.

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Zango's Latest Trick: Pitching Fake Batman MMORPG To Get People To Download Adware

from the and-so-it-goes dept

We've talked about Zango's continued claims that it's a changed company from the one that paid huge fines for tricking people into downloading its intrusive adware, but somethings never really seem to change. An anonymous reader points us to an ad found on a bunch of legitimate video game sites recently, pitching a new Batman online virtual world game, but if you click through, it turns out that it's just a severely limited demo version of a client-side Batman game from 2001. Despite the ad promising all sorts of things, such as "play online with your friends" the actual download has none of that... but it does include an install of Zango. Chris Boyd, who figured all this out wonders why the sites that ran this ad did so, knowing that it was almost certainly bogus. Zango, of course, will blame a "rogue affiliate" which is what they always do -- but Boyd wonders why they won't actually identify who's responsible.

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Turns Out Virtual Worlds Teach Players The Scientific Method

from the well,-how-about-that dept

With so many articles trashing video games all the time, Clive Thompson (who continues to consistently write the most interesting articles for whatever publication he's writing for at the time) has a report about a new study that notes that kids playing virtual world video games are basically learning the scientific method, without even realizing it. That is, in order to achieve certain goals and milestones, groups work together to put forth a hypothesis and data on how best to tackle a problem -- and then when it doesn't work, they regroup, and change the hypothesis based on the new data. In fact, the research found that when looking at forums discussing the games, rather than a bunch of juvenile trash-talking (though, there was some of that too), much of the conversation would mimic the process of scientific discovery and understanding:

Someone would pose a question -- like what sort of potions a high-class priest ought to carry around, or how to defeat a particular monster -- and another would post a reply, offering data and facts gathered from their own observations. Others would jump into the fray, disputing the theory, refining it, offering other facts. Eventually, once everyone was convinced the theory was supported by the data, the discussion would peter out.

The researcher then takes this a step further, suggesting that one way we could revive sagging science education in this country is to embrace this aspect of video games, and get students to recognize that what they're doing is the basic process of scientific discovery, so that they don't think of science as being boring and irrelevant to their lives.

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