Ron Paul says "Impeach Bush and Cheney" - Video Captured Over iPhone! [Updated]

I apologize in advance for the subterfuge: this is actually not an article, but an experiment. There are several web sites like Digg, Reddit, and several others, where members can nominate interesting web articles, and people vote on them as they come in - sometimes popular articles get thousands of votes, and hit the front page, generating a ton of web traffic to that site.

In the last couple weeks, there has been an absolute flood of articles in three categories: 1) Anything about Presidential candidate Ron Paul, 2) Any calling for Bush and/or Cheney's impeachment, 3) anything at all about the iPhone (although iPhone stories have fallen off a bit in the last three days).

This is not necessarily because these are really the topics most people are interested in. This happens because there are groups of people that troll these sites in order to manipulate the system. They search for anything with the words "impeach", "Ron Paul", and/or "iPhone" in the title, and vote for it, often without even reading it. So I'm conducting an experiment of my own; I'm using all three in one title, and then see how many blind hits I get for it. This should be fun. Later I'll update this article and publish the results, if any.

By combining all three of the above concepts, I might be overreaching a bit. It would probably be better to stick to only one at a time. Still, I'm curious about what will happen.

By the way, I'm not the first one to try something like this. You can read this article, "I Bought Votes on Digg" for one amusing experiment earlier this year to get an article on the front page of Digg.

Update 08/07/07 10:40:00 PM: 24 hours later, my experiment worked to a modest degree. My site traffic more than doubled in the next few hours after posting, although it was nowhere near my highest totals. The majority were from Digg. I did not get as many diggs as I expected for the story however, and Reddit was really surprising. Not only did I not get any votes on their site, but not even any referrals either! What a rip-off! I guess no one there was fooled; as I said earlier, the title may have been a little over the top.

I did get a fair amount of hate email, and hate comments, both here and at the Digg site. Also note the comment from "impeach for peace", that was obviously automatically generated, since if they spent even five seconds reading this site they would know it didn't belong here.

One thing that did surprise me was that my Google traffic surged from the number of people using the keywords "ron paul". But that search generates almost 3 million references. How in the hell did they find my blog in all that??

Just for the record, I don't really have anything against Ron Paul, Bush or Cheney, or even the iPhone (although, for what it's worth, I think the Palm Treo is superior...).



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