| Data
Shaping Solutions Viral Marketing: planting fake referrals in people's referrer
logs, for money. Mining that lucrative "site owner who reads and clicks every single
referrer" percentile, as if a half-dozen apparent hits from "http://www.my-site.com?r=increase+your+web+ranking"
could be anything other than morbid, corrupting spam.
But if it reaches absurd and devious levels, I trust that some shining defender of freedom will set up a
publicly-accessible list of fake-referrers, for filtering purposes. I'm still waiting for
a merciless, half-convincing mailing-list-and-blog-comment
spambot, myself. "Interesting point, [membername]. From my experience with [subjectnoun],
I've found that it helps to have some sort of [producttype], such as..." or "yeh, cool, i saw a cool [subject] game like that at [url] ;)"
By 2004, the majority of the Internet will be fake. [via Matt]
| 
