Update: And like a swift judo chop to the groin for Microsoft, Google has announced a Twitter deal as well.

All Things D got the scoop this morning on two upcoming deals Microsoft has made to integrate real time updates from Twitter and Facebook into their Bing search engine. Their post was later confirmed by an official Microsoft announcement. The deal is a coup for Microsoft because it means they’ve successfully beat out Google from integrating real time updates into their search engine. The two have been trying to court Facebook and Twitter for some time now, with rumors of buyouts floating among all the various deals. While Google remains tops in traditional web searching, the value of real time searching is also becoming more apparent every day. For once, Microsoft has access to something Google doesnt.

Not surprisingly, the implementation of both services into Bing will be very different. All Twitter posts will appear automatically (and I assume private Twitter posts won’t), but Facebook users will have to opt in due to the closed nature of that social network. Strangely enough, the implementation of real time search into Bing seems to be directly at odds with their current marketing campaign, which heralds Bing as the cure for search overload. It’ll be some time before we see these services in action, but if Bing’s real time search results end up cluttering their other results, I’m going to have to call shenanigans.

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Bing Adds Twitter and Facebook Posts to Search Results, Should Google Worry?

• Do Verizon’s “iDon’t” Ads Miss the Point?
• The Android T-Mobile G1 is the Real Successor to the Helio Ocean
• Dear Digsby, Where’s the Group Chat and In Line Text Formatting?!
• 1080p Xbox Movie Streaming Works as Advertised
• Digsby Opens Up with Public Beta, Adds Twitter & Voice/Video Support

Last night I attended my first session of the New York Tech Meetup, and it seems I’ve found exactly what I’ve been looking for in the city when it comes to a vibrant tech community. I recently moved to New York from Western Massachusetts to pursue a career writing about technology and film–after several years of IT work and dreaming about making the jump to writing full time. I had already gotten my taste of the film blogging world after covering Comic-Con and several press screenings for Slashfilm, but I had yet to get a full sense of what being in New York means for my tech interests until last night.

The first thing I noticed during the evening’s introduction (by NYTM organizer Nate Westheimer) was that New York techies seem to have a major complex towards the Silicon Valley and Boston tech communities. There’s a clear cultural difference between NY and the Valley, but as someone who spent their entire life halfway between New York and Boston (I grew up in Hartford, then went to college and worked for four years in Western Mass.), it never really occurred to me how the NY tech community was different than Boston. Westheimer mentioned one key difference (which he also wrote about on his blog)–that the NY community fails at connecting the university and commercial spaces.

Given the tech titans we’ve seen come out of MIT and Harvard, I think he may have a point. Culturally, Boston tends to focus on academia and intellectualism, so it’s no surprise that their higher educational institutions aren’t ignored when it comes to commercial tech ventures.  Westheimer went on to explain that the scheduled demos (two from Columbia, and two  from NYU) were examples of the innovation coming out of the university space, and that the commercial sector should take note.

Here’s a rundown of those demos:

Green Dot (NYU)

On their site, the Green Dot folks describe their work as “a research project that investigates motion capture, pattern recognition, and ‘Intrinsic Biometrics’ techniques to detect and analyze human movement signatures in video.” In short, their technology resembles the motion capturing we see today (wherein an actor’s movements are recorded via dots placed on their body), except without the need to wear anything. After a video feed is processed by their technology, the end result is a video with green dots tracking the movement in the source. Again, this looks very similar to footage you see from typical motion capturing techniques today.

They demoed some video footage of famous figures and pointed out some interesting factoids based on their visual signatures. The project is government funded, and you can definitely foresee some military uses of this technology once it’s perfected. They describe their current focus as “the analysis of national and international public figures while they are giving speeches, with future plans to investigate many other domains.” Read into that what you will.

On the consumer and professional levels, the technology could be really useful for bringing motion capturing to the masses. Imagine taking a video of your cat walking, and then applying that motion to a 3D figure.  If you’re an iPhone 3G or 3GS user and want to try it out for yourself, you can download their application from the app store, just search for “Dot Show Ian Spiro”.

CuZero (Columbia)

CuZero is an interesting attempt at changing the way we search for images. The presenter points out that image searching in its current fashion simply doesn’t work very well (anyone who has used the Google Images search for any length of time can attest to that). For the most part, image searching today relies on file names, the “alt” tag (which can be placed alongside the images on a website, but usually isn’t), and text surrounding the picture.

CuZero turns this paradigm on its head by allowing you to bring in text and image queries into a grid, and prioritize the different elements of your search in real time. You can also further filter your search results via a similar interactive method. It’s honestly hard to explain in words, so head over to their website and check out a video demo.

I got a very Minority Report vibe from the way they were able to interact with their queries, and the way their system also recognized buildings and other elements from pictures was also fascinating. This research certainly has the potential to change the way we search for images in the future.

Musically Intelligent Machines (Columbia)

Musically Intelligent Machines is a project that aims to automatically classify music–much in the same way Pandora works, except without the need for human intervention. The developers crawled through 15,000 mp3s to demo the service, and you can play with it on their site. The presenter mentioned that he was surprised the software could determine what constituted “British” music. Apparently it’s smart enough to determine British accents, and possibly even British styles of music.

Overall, the software works as advertised, and there is certainly a market for this sort of thing. I’d be interested to see how it would compete on a commercial scale against the likes of Last.FM and Pandora.

Teaching Robots to See (NYU)

At these sorts of events, there has to be at least one project that portends the impending robot uprising, and this project’s goal of creating robots that can see certainly brings Skynet to mind. NYU professor Yann LeCun demonstrated the research by showing how their software can recognize objects (he used a toy soldier, which was recognized as human, and a toy airplane that was recognized as an airplane). He also showed how they’ve trained robots to move autonomously and avoid objects using a dual camera system for eyes.

His work actually comes out of the same place that Green Dot calls home, the Vision Learning Graphics group at NYU. With their technologies combined, we could easily see some very important future developments emerging.

Dan Bricklin was also interviewed by the great NY blogger Anil Dash. Bricklin was both hilarious and insightful, and I now feel compelled to grab his new book at some point. There’s something about tech history stories that I find completely fascinating, and as creator of the spreadsheet (among many contributions), he must certainly have some good stories to tell.

Check out Dan’s interview, along with the rest of the event, at the NYTM video page.

More than 1,000 words later, I realize now that I could write about this Meetup for several more pages. I take that as a good sign. The NYTM makes me excited to be a techie in New York, and I’m proud to be the third person to RSVP for October’s event. If you’d like to join, simply sign up via their Meetup page. I would love to have some Meetup buddies!

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Thoughts on the September 09 New York Tech Meetup

• The iPhone 3G is a Call to Arms for Mobile Computing
• Cuil and The Trouble with Tech Blogging
• What nVidia’s Tegra Means for Mobile Devices, and Why You Should Care
• Apple’s New Anti-Windows 7 Ads Hurt My Brain
• Bing Adds Twitter and Facebook Posts to Search Results, Should Google Worry?

In an attempt to move in a different direction from the rest of the blogosphere, I was going to write something about how strange it was that the ill-fated search engine Cuil was covered so widely in mainstream press. Unfortunately, it looks like ReadWriteWeb beat me to it.

I encourage you to read their piece, because it pretty much covers everything I had in mind. But I will say this: Cuil was the first story I heard on NPR when I woke up Monday morning, and I was constantly asked about it throughout the day by non-tech folk who had read about it in other mainstream sources. That sort of coverage truly surprised me because, for the most part, Cuil seemed like many other geeky startups that the blogosphere adores, but average internet users generally ignore.

The Trouble with Tech Bloggers…

But enough has been said about Cuil’s fail whale of a launch. Instead, check out this recent post by Sarah Lacy, who uses the Cuil launch to discuss a problematic trend in the technology blogosphere. She believes that the obsessive rush to break news before other sites, coupled with the obcenely short hype-cycle of online tech journalism, is ultimately not very useful readers:

At some point, the tech blogosphere has to break itself from the junky-like addiction of having to get a story two seconds before the competitor. Can it really drive that much traffic when every other blogger got the same pre-brief? Isn’t it better to wait a bit, use the service and write something smarter?

If we’ve got a 20-second hype cycle in the Valley, that’s not Cuil’s fault. And I don’t think it’s serving readers well either. If we write something is amazing in the morning and then total junk in the afternoon, does anyone looking to tech blogs for analysis keep coming back?

Specifically, Lacy points to many bloggers (including herself) giving a generally favorable preview to Cuil without actually using it, and then having to turn around and be extra nasty when they realized how little it lived up to the hype they helped create.

…And how we can move forward

This isn’t an entirely original criticism, but I think the Cuil case is fairly indicative of these larger issues facing the tech blogosphere. To her first point, I certainly agree that the rush to be first has led to some shoddy work, but at the same time it appears to be a logical evolution of competitive print journalism. The problem is that with online journalism a story can break any second, whereas print journalism generally works on a monthly, weekly, daily (and sometimes twice daily), news cycle.

It would certainly be nice for tech bloggers to worry less about being first to post, but since being first tends to directly correlate to success on Digg, Reddit, and other social media sites, I don’t see that trend ending anytime soon. Sites like TechCrunch and Mashable aren’t ever going to get away from that grind, but it does leave the door open for bloggers of a different sort to offer more thoughtful analysis, a potential answer to her second criticism.

While these bloggers may initially miss out on the blink-and-you-miss-it relevancy cycle generated by the bigger tech blogs, social media sites, and Techmeme–I believe they could eventually prolong the cycle by daring to cover stories that are (gasp) several days old. Even more shocking, they could even cover content that’s sometimes routinely ignored by the bigger tech and social media sites. (Scoble has an interesting response to Lacy’s post that offers some similar thoughts.)

Of course, my feelings on this matter come from personal experience. With this blog, I know that I can’t always break news like the big sites, but I can still attempt to create interesting content that isn’t necessarily beholden to their manic relevancy cycle or the gods of social media. I know there are many other aspiring tech bloggers who are working towards similar goals as well, so whenever someone mentions the decline of tech blogging I can’t help but think they’re just not looking hard enough, and that may be the real problem.

Few are.

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Cuil and The Trouble with Tech Blogging

• Dear Digsby, Where’s the Group Chat and In Line Text Formatting?!
• Did You Hear? I Think Apple’s Releasing a Tablet!
• My Thoughts on the Palm Pre
• Looking Forward to the Android Takeover
• Lamenting the Death of Helio, and How the iPhone Helped Kill It

This latest release for public beta adds Twitter support, something which I’m going to take serious advantage of, support for video/voice chat, and an inline spell checker. You can find the rest of the updates for this release here.

Since I’ve started using Digsby I find that the only thing I truly miss from Trillian was the plentiful skins available at Deviant Art and other sites. Digsby advertises skins on their front page, but I suppose that we haven’t seen any yet because the product was hidden away in private beta. Now that it’s out in the open I suspect the skinning community to have a field day.

Unfortunately, judging from the screenshots, it appears that Digsby sticks with a fairly standard UI throughout different skins. Skinning seems only to affect the colors used in the application and the background image on the buddy list. I hope this is something that is improved upon eventually. For now, I’ll enjoy their Adium-styled conversation themes–something which I’ve been dying for on the PC side.

I was hoping that Digsby’s release would spur on the Trillian Folks to bust out with a private or public beta, but alas it’s still languishing in alpha hell. I have nothing but love for those folks, and being a former Trillian user for 7 years, I would totally love it if Astra came out and totally showed these young Digsby whippersnappers a thing or two.

Oh well.

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Digsby Opens Up with Public Beta, Adds Twitter & Voice/Video Support

• Dear Digsby, Where’s the Group Chat and In Line Text Formatting?!
• Did You Hear? I Think Apple’s Releasing a Tablet!
• Thoughts on the September 09 New York Tech Meetup
• Surprise? Bluray Adoption Slows, Upconverting DVD Players Find Success
• I’m a Firefox Extension Addict, and Why That’s Good for Mozilla

As of today Mint.com, the much-hyped Web 2.0 personal finance site, is open to the public. This also means that their NDA has expired, so I’ll finally be able to share what I’ve learned about the service while beta testing it these past few weeks.

Please note that the screenshots on this page were grabbed from Mint’s feature page. They mentioned that they would make screenshots available to bloggers and press, but I have yet to see any pop up on their press resource page. Unfortunately I couldn’t take any screenshots of my own because every page is chock full of private financial data.

Overview

If you’re at all interested in keeping track of your spending habits but just can’t find the motivation to configure and update traditional financing software, then Mint is exactly what you’ve been looking for. It allows you to track the activity across multiple accounts, including checking and savings accounts as well as credit cards, all in one convenient location.

Using Mint

After the initial sign up is completed you then configure Mint to keep track of your various accounts. Upon successful authentication for each account, which they assure is bank-level secure, Mint then gives you an overview page showing your total cash and debt, and a nifty comparison between the two. It also allows you to get a quick glance at your current spending trends–something which really deserves special mention: Mint’s intelligent tracking for spending trends is by far its best feature.

Spending Trend Analysis

While it offers the ability to see all of your transactions in a typical list format (more on this list later), Mint’s trend analysis brings all of that data to the next level. At the top of the “Spending Trends” page you have a pie chart that organizes your spending into useful categories like “Bills”, “Entertainment”, and “Food and Dining”. By clicking on an individual slice of the pie you then get a more specific view of your spending within that category. When looking at the “Entertainment” slice I’m presented with another pie chart that separates my spending into “Arts”, “Movies and DVDs”, and “Other”.

I’ve found that Mint’s visual and categorical interpretation of my financial data to be extremely useful. Buying an individual DVD here or there may normally seem harmless, but seeing your “Entertainment” slice account for a hefty chunk of your spending for the month is a definite wake up call. Thankfully, this isn’t typical behavior for me: This past month I’ve been honeymooning with my HD-DVD player, so I’ve definitely spent gobs more on (HD)-DVDs than I typically do.

Below the main pie chart on the trends page you have the ability to dynamically adjust the time for which Mint is determining trends. Unfortunately they only offer a horizontal slider with a vague monthly time line for doing so. For example, you could easily use it analyze what you’ve spent between the middle of August to the end of September, but you don’t have any way of find the same information for specific dates. This is definitely something that has to be corrected.

The last part of the trends page uses bar graphs to compare what you’ve spent across individual categories over the past six months. Since Mint can only track expense data starting the month that you’ve signed up for the service,this feature won’t be entirely useful until you’ve used Mint for a few months. It seems strange that Mint can’t analyze data from the months before joining given that it should have access to the older transaction data from your bank and credit card companies. I’m going to do some research to see if this is an issue that is peculiar to me for some reason.

Also take note that you’re limited to only viewing the past six months of comparison graphs. I’m sure many users would appreciate the ability to compare trends further than that.

The Transaction Page

Fresh out of the box (so to speak), I was impressed with the relative accuracy that Mint parsed my transactions into categories. It’s not entirely perfect however, and that’s where the Transaction page I mentioned above comes into play. Here you get a convenient list of your transactions across your multiple accounts. You can of course search for specific transactions and view transactions within individual accounts, but Mint stays true to it’s Web 2.0 roots by allowing you to assign “Labels” (read: Tags) to transactions as well as changing the category for a transaction.

Changing the category affects what the Spending Trends page displays, so it’s worth the extra effort to make sure that your transactions are all categorize correctly. You can also assign category rules that can get applied to specific transaction names. For example, quirky restaurant names tend to confuse Mint’s auto-categorizing algorithm, so you’ll want to make sure that a rule is set up on them to put them in the “Restaurant” category.

Even though you may have to spend some time clarifying transaction categories it’s still far less time than you would spend keeping Quicken up to date. Also, since you can set up rules on transactions Mint will eventually “learn” to categorize all of your common transactions correctly.

Ways to Save

Mint’s other claim to fame is its ability to recommend ways that you can save money. This all occurs in the “Ways to Save” tab. Mint will recognize things that you subscribe to, your cable provider or bank institution, for example, and offer up alternative solutions that could save you money. Right now it’s recommending that I use Verizon fiber internet instead of Comcast cable internet.

I suspect that this is the main way Mint is going to be earning money. Given that the service is ad free at this point, I can’t really accept that these “deals” are entirely altruistic. Still, if some people are able to save money and Mint gets a referral cut I see nothing wrong with that. I expect that Mint will favor the deals that make them more money, rather than the ones that save more money for users.

Automatic Alerts

Mint can also automatically alert you through SMS or e-mail on the following topics (copied from their features page):

• Low balances in any checking/savings account
• Credit card bill due dates
• Available credit on credit cards
• High/unusual spending by category (i.e. Shopping, Dining, Gas)
• Bank/ATM fees and finance charges
• Large purchases
• Large deposits becoming available

Although I didn’t use these extensively, I could definitely see the value in having an alert set up in case of low checking account balance or strange high spending. This is the sort of thing that worries me about new technology though: Users may end up using these reminders from Mint as a crutch and may just get even lazier about remember to pay their bills. Unfortunately, that seems to be the inevitable cost when technology makes things more convenient.

Wrapping Up

Overall I’m very pleased with Mint at this point. Given all the hype its uberexclusive beta was gathering, I’m glad to see that it is a somewhat revolutionary service. Mint’s main issue now isn’t so much internal. If they really want to succeed they’re going to have to find a bigger audience than the tech-savvy crowd. They’re going to have to convince the public that their service is secure and trustworthy, and they should make sure to publicize it in traditional media outlets as well.

Mint also needs to get a live demo so that people can play with ASAP. No matter how many screen shots, videos, or extensive write ups there are, Mint is the sort of service that some people, especially the general public, have to see in action to truly appreciate.

Finally, they need to add more robust features to the platform so that the service can fully compete with the likes of Quicken. They don’t need to add those crazy features that only Quicken masters learn to use, but they should allow you to export your data into a spreadsheet, and make it easy to cull tax-relevant data.

Given that Mint already has such a strong start, I suspect that they’ll only continue to get better as time goes on. The product also pretty much sells itself, so popularity among the service is pretty much guaranteed. This is a good thing–Mint is the sort of thing everyone should be using.

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Mint Review: Managing Your Money with Web 2.0

• Why Xbox Live Can’t Be Free… Yet
• The iPhone 3G is a Call to Arms for Mobile Computing
• Finally, Netflix Streaming is Coming to the PS3
• Surprise? Bluray Adoption Slows, Upconverting DVD Players Find Success
• The Nanda Alarm Clock eBay Fail

You might remember this site from the waves it made a few weeks ago at social news sites. It was a seemingly useful experiment meant to compare the uptime of several inexpensive hosting providers when faced with a flood of traffic. Dubbed the “Web 2.0 Effect: Which Host Will Survive?”, a term they invented to group the sort of traffic rush you get from being featured on sites like Slashdot and Digg, the experiment looked to be a useful reference for anyone getting started with paid website hosting. The experiment relied on being flooded with traffic, and that they were by Digg and Reddit. It garnered an impressive 1,812 Diggs and 838 Reddits at the time of this post.

I was first referred to the site from a friend who was looking for hosting of his own. I distinctly remember the first thought that went through my head when I saw the winner: “Who the hell is Burton Hosting?” That started a chain of events that made this post necessary. My friends and I thought there was a good chance that this entire project was just a marketing ploy, and we set out to do some research.

What we found confirmed our suspicions several times over: It appears that the Web 2.0 Effect was not a legitimate experiment in any way. We surmise that it was, in actuality, an elaborate viral marketing ploy meant to shovel sales into the hands of Burton Hosting.

Initial Suspicions

As I mentioned already, I found it curious that a relatively unknown hosting provider won out so clearly. There were several other peculiarities I noted upon first seeing the site:

• This wasn’t a very realistic experiment: The test was simply a paragraph of “Lorem ipsum” text on a colored background. If they really wanted to test real-world hosting capabilities they should have included post-1995 web features such as images, dynamic content through a database connection, and scripting of some sort.
• It wasn’t a controlled experiment: The crux of the project relied on seeing which hosts choked when flooded with traffic. The problem is that the site needs to be highly publicized to get that traffic in the first place. What’s to prevent any of the featured hosts from surreptitiously allocating more resources to the sites? Nothing, that’s what.
• Where are the better known hosting services?: Where’s the geek favorite, Dreamhost? And for that matter, where’s Bluehost, Lunarpages, Godaddy, or any other semi-popular hosting service?
  • Take note that the HostGator test subject is actually listed as a HostGator Reseller. Any potential problems with that listing could be attributed to the reseller allocating their allotted resources badly.
• Burton is the least popular by far of all of the providers being tested: A quick Alexa comparison showed us that Burton receives drastically less traffic than the competitors. Burton is the blue line trailing the bottom of the graph.

Digging Deeper

A more thorough investigation confirmed that we were right to be suspicious. We started by running a simple WhoIS search on the 0effect.org domain. That gave us two names: Russ Jones and Ronald Jaffre. Looking at the Reddit submission, we learned that rjonesx submitted the site to Reddit. That matched the gmail address listed in the WhoIs data, so it appeared that Russ had Reddited his own site. There isn’t anything wrong with that in general, so we looked to the Digg submission next.

Russvirante was the Digg user who submitted the story, and we assumed that this was Russ Jones as well. Googling for Russ Jones, we found that Virante.com is among the first few search results — specifically, as Virante High Potential Web Marketing. A quick glance at that site showed us that Russel Jones is actually the CTO of Virante. And unsurprisingly, one of their specialties is social media/viral marketing. Now the idea of the “Web 2.0 Effect” site being used as a viral marketing campaign for Burton Hosting begins to gain some substance.

A Super Smart Experiment?

We then found a blog that Jones writes for, which also looks to be directly affiliated with Virante. In this post, Jones links directly to the “Web 2.0 Effect” site but talks about it as if he just happened across it. Not only does he give it a fabulously self-serving title (”Super Smart Experiment: Surviving the Digg Effect”), he also can’t seem to help gushing all over his own project:

“Definitely one of the smarter experiments I have seen these days… I absolutely love this kind of attitude of bootstrap experimentation, especially when it is crafted in a way that makes it really accurate. I have seen stories before where they just pound 1 host, but not one where they can really compare multiple hosts at the same time. Kudos!”

Sorry Russ, I don’t believe you can give kudos to yourself, especially not when you’re possibly revealing your connection to a “secret” marketing plot by doing so.

So here’s the rub–why did Jones disassociate himself with this project at all? The likeliest solution, of course, is that he didn’t want the “Web 2.0 Effect” project to be tied directly to his blog or Virante. A quick glance at the Virante.com main page shows us that posts from the “Google Cache” blog show up in a highlighted section. They couldn’t very well admit to creating this experiment on the blog if it’s in actuality something they’re doing for a paying client.

Social Spin

Still, I suppose he reserves the right to call this a “super smart” experiment. He successfully fooled the vast majority of the online community, save for a few insightful Reddit and Digg users. I found more evidence of marketing misinformation by sifting through Russ’s responses to the Reddit and Digg submissions. When pressed that this looks like marketing spam on Reddit, Russ replies:

“If you notice, there are no affiliate links for any of the domains and the data is displayed as clearly and openly as possible.

I am sorry that I can’t prove it to you that it is not advertising, it is simply impossible to do that. All I can say is that, to me, it would be very valuable to know which hosting company can survive this kind of traffic on a $5/month account. Unfortunately, i can’t figure that out without something like this, and I could only afford to try 9 hosting accounts (many require multi-month sign ups which are expensive!)”

The site definitely has an air of transparency. At first, it doesn’t look like they are trying to make any money from gathering so much traffic. Then again, if I were pulling a massive marketing stunt like this, that’s exactly what I’d want the audience to think as well.

Also, I find it hilarious that he says they couldn’t afford to test other hosting providers because it gets expensive. In that case, wouldn’t it make more sense to make the most of your funds and efficiently test hosting providers that people actually use?

Jones also reveals a sliver of truth in a later Reddit comment:

“I am a CTO at a small web design / development company. This information we need to know for our clients, and the only way we could figure it out was open it up to the community (how else are we going to get the traffic to really figure out which ones are the best?)

So, we can pretend its altruistic :), but really it was a question I needed answered, but I needed everyone else to make it happen.”

First off, he tells us he’s a CTO (and we know for a fact that he is), and yet he couldn’t afford to have his company pump more funds into this experiment? It’s hard to imagine that even a small company couldn’t shell out for a more thorough survey of hosting options, especially given all the free publicity they would have gotten for providing such a useful service to budding website owners.

Also, I find it extremely telling that he mentioned he needed this information for his clients. It’s clear that this experiment didn’t really provide much in the way of useful information, but it would be useful for a client looking to garner some publicity. Saying that this experiment is meant for his clients is somewhat of a half-truth then, as it’s certainly a boon for Burton Hosting.

Other Points of Interest

We also gathered some other random facts during our investigation which make the “Web 2.0 Effect” appear suspect:

• Burton Hosting is the only provider in this experiment not based on the U.S. They’re actually based out of the United Kingdom. This makes it seem all the stranger that they would be chosen for this test.
• Ronald Jaffre, the other name in the WhoIS lookup for 0effect.org, has an address listed for Alvaston in Derby UK. Of course this is more circumstantial than most of the other evidence, but it does seem strange that Jaffre supposedly lives a mere 118 miles from Burton Hosting. (The Burton address was gleamed from the WhoIS lookup for their domain.)
• Both the Burton.com and 0effect.org IPs resolve in Georgia. Could be just a coincidence, but then again there have been too many of those already.

Summing Up

So it appears that something is not quite right with the “Web 2.0 Effect.” You don’t have to be a conspiracy nut to notice that there are simply too many problems with the experiment, among other coincidences and revelations, that lead us to believe that it wasn’t legitimate. While we couldn’t find any direct link between Virante and Burton Hosting, the implication gathered from all of this evidence is clear: Virante fooled the web good.

If anything, I hope that shedding light on this covert marketing ploy will make us warier of similar viral plots in the future. It stinks that we have to worry about marketing being pranced about as legitimate data, but it appears to be an unavoidable situation.

As technology makes it easier for users to connect and collaborate, it makes it even easier for advertisers to take advantage of our good will. We are not powerless against such tactics. Learn about and preach media literacy, never take any information for granted, and always ask questions.

Update 1: 7/6/07 – 6:19pm

Thanks for all the support everyone! Also, I knew more evidence would pop up once this story hit the wild. Digg user Dhalgren points out the following:

“What’s with the hidden links on the 0effect.org site?
From the HTML:
< div style='display:none;' >
< a href="http://concertmaps.wetpaint.com">concertmaps< /a >
< a href="http://concertmaps.wikispaces.com">concertmaps< /a >
< a href="http://digg.com/users/concertmaps/news/dugg" >concertmaps< /a >
< a href="http://www.myspace.com/concertmaps">concertmaps< /a >
< a href="http://concertmaps.wordpress.com">concertmaps< /a >
< a href="http://concertmaps.icontact.com/" >concertmaps< /a >
< /div >
< div style='display:none' >< a href='http://www.leisurelandscapes.com' >Leisure Landscapes< /a >< /div >
Also, it looks like he had a tracker with Burton:
< img src='track.php?host=burton&url=http://207.210.100.214' height=1 width=1 style='visibility:hidden;' >

Why only have a tracker with Burton? Looks suspicious to me. Like he wanted his client to know how much traffic was generated for their viral advertising…”

Although it looks like the page was edited after he posted this revealation:

“Since I’ve posted this he’s removed the links and is making the track.php dynamic. It wasn’t before…”

Not only were there hidden links, but it was quite obvious that Burton was tracking the hits to the “Web 2.0 Effect” site!

In addition, Digg users mmmooo and eviljim found a very interesting reference to a “viranteviral” project through the Apache server signature. Mmmooo notes:

“all this research, and for what…

Russ, you forgot to have bruton change the apache server sig for your ‘test’.

Apache/1.3.37 Server at www.viranteviral.burtondns.org Port 80

(just hit http://207.210.100.214/foobar)

ooops!

sounds marketing-ish.”

That probably wasn’t the best name for a secret viral project server, no?

Both of these new pieces of evidence further cement the relationship between Virante and Burton hosting. Russ has spent quite some time in the Digg and Reddit comments trying to convince us of the legitimacy of the experiment. I wonder what he would have to say about this new evidence…

Update 2: 7/8/2007 10:16pm

A few more quick updates. First off, in the interest of full disclosure, I changed the title of the story (but not the permalink) to include “Burton” and “Virante” to give this article a boost when people search for those terms. I think these tactics should be known to anyone who deals with Virante or Burton in the future.

I should mention that the main reason I invested so much in this article is that I really hate it when people take advantage of growing social media trends. I know there isn’t much we can do to avoid it. Whenever something popular appears, people will figure out a way to game it for their own benefit. In this case though, at least I was able to make a bit of a difference.

A couple hours ago, I e-mailed Russ Jones to see if he had any explanation for the evidence in the first update above. Seeing as how those two bits were pretty much the last nail in the coffin for this project, I was curious to see if he had any reasonable response to them. I’ll let you guys know if anything comes about from that.

Unsurprised to say the least.
I’ve caught Burton Hosting posting fake reviews to a number of web hosting review sites previously as well — including our own. They’ve been spamming on digg for awhile under a few different aliases.. a number have reached the frontpage.

So it appears that Burton is not new to sketchy marketing tactics, this project was just their biggest attempt to date. To be fair, tons of hosting companies do the same, but it’s especially relevant that we know Burton isn’t afraid to engage in these activities. You can find some of their fake reviews over here, along with one that ranks them as “Poor.”

Update 3: 7/20/07 11:11pm

Is Virante and co. pwned? Well according to Google, it looks like they are. Honestly I never expected this article to be awarded with such a lofty geek title, but it looks like you readers made it happen. Take note that before this update, I never once used the term “pwned” in this post, and honestly I don’t think in my site either.

Since this moment of victory is sure to be short, I’ve captured this moment in history for all eternity. Click the thumbnail below for the full picture:

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Uncovering The Web2.0Effect.org Hoax: How Virante Marketing Solutions & Burton Hosting Fooled the Web

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