Fake Grass Episode Three

Power has been seized from Angela, and now I have posted my own entry, mwa-ha-ha-ha-meow.

I am Angela's cat, and I got bored with her videoblog, so i decided to make one of my own. All her whining about astroturfing made me wonder if she would think it was so terrible if I used it to drum up a bit of interest in her videoblog. So, I astroturfed some websites about her project, and now I am kicking back with some vintage Snappy Tom to see if astroturfing actually works.

I started off by making some obviously-needed-edits to the 'Astroturfing' webpage at wikipedia, moved into spamming Angela's email contacts, tried out a bit of weblog astroturfing on related topics, and posted a video on YouTube.

My experiment, as I predicted, has not been successful. Wikipedia rumbled me and took out my 'improvements', got a lot of abuse from the blogs, a lot of the emails went to people who couldn't view the videos, and overall, there hasn't been that much increase in internet traffic to the vlog. 13 people have viewed my video on YouTube, but not sure, of those, how many clicked to go back and look at my video at iGen.

I might step the campaign up this week to completely prove my hypothesis that Astroturfing isn't really so bad... but then again, I might just enjoy a nap.

Media, Images and People used in Episode Three

Starring: Lucille Belle Caple ('Lucy')

Theme Music: Ring tone from Optus Zoo: www.optuszoo.com.au

Music: drumbeat from GarageBand.

Wikipedia: 'Astroturfing.'(2006) Wikipedia: The Free Encylcopedia. [online] Retrieved 22 September 2006: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing.

UWA Webmail: 'The University of Western Australia Email Service.' (2006) The University of Western Australia. [online] Retrieved 22 September 2006: http://webmail.uwa.edu.au

Weblogs Astroturfed: TBA

YouTube: caplea02 (2006) 'Fake Grass and the Cyber City.' YouTube. [online] Retrieved 22 September 2006: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mZK8XH6dvY