Andy Sernowitz talks about how MGM/ABC appear to be astroturfing blogs in the comments. Someone is promoting a movie DVD and saying how good it is without declaring that they are apparently being paid to promote the site – at least that is the conclusion looking at the content and the emails. You quickly learn how to spot (most) of these. I usually let them through with an editorial comment attached.
Bu how come big companies like this are still not learning from their and others’ mistakes. There have been so many cases of astroturfing being spotted, …read more

I was looking through my referrers and found a link from this BabyExpert Forum, linking through to one of the sessions on mobile use I had written up the other week.
Rimmel campaign in the UK. We created phonewear – mobile is a reflection of you and your personality. Rimmel can and built on this. A number was in a TV ad – phone a number -get told to text to a shortcode, got free Rimmel screensaver. You got a silver image – or a ‘gold’ crown – drive you to the MySpace page, with a code, to win 25GBP of …read more

I got a comment on my Bratz post yesterday. Nothing new there, I got quite a few on the Barbie posts. But this one made me stop and take a closer look at it – it just looked wrong to me. (extract below)
Personally, I find the Bratz dolls to be an exact copy of the Barbies I played with when I was a little girl … Recently, I found the solution to my problems. As an avid collector of dolls, I have to say the TyGirlz dolls are incredible and way better than Bratz! … I am over …read more