Dishwasher on Mars

Interesting data and an excellent companion to the discussion about the state of Buzz were having on RWW last week: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/open_thread_are_you_still_using_google_b...

So the idea that we came up with was, what if we sort of eased into this, not with a hard sales pitch on one of our products, but with something that said, hey, I'm getting back in touch with consumers, I'm going on this journey as a company to get back into having a consumer conversation with people. Let's try to find an icebreaker.

In 2008 the Hong Kong-based researcher David Bandurski determined that at least 280,000 people had been hired at various levels of government to work as “online commentators.” Known derisively as the “fifty cent party,” these people are paid to write postings that show their employers in a favorable light in online chat rooms, social networking services, blogs, and comments sections of news websites. Many more people do similar work as volunteers—recruited from among the ranks of retired officials as well as college students in the Communist Youth League who aspire to become Party members.

According to the MAAWG report, a full half of all North American and Western European users admitted to having opened spam, with nearly half of those people (46 percent) doing so intentionally. Sure, a quarter of those users claimed they did so in order to unsubscribe or complain to the sender—bad idea, people!—but a full 15 percent said they opened spam because they were interested in the products or services being offered. Another 18 percent simply wanted to "see what would happen," and four percent actually forwarded an e-mail they identified as spam to someone else.

I can't help but wonder what the graph looked like during the music festival. Are there actually non-geeks who use check-in apps?