Some things you might not have known about Grant Shapps. Or Michael Green. Or….
All of these are true. It says so on Twitter.
You know those so-called “splogs” or spam blogs that have sprung up like Kudzu all over the web? They’re made up entirely of contact scraped from other sides and served up slathered in advertising. They pollute search engine results by using all kinds of dirty tricks to game search engine algorithms to make them appear above the legitimate sites they steal content from. They’re purely parasitical, bilking money from Google Adsense without creating anything of value, and stealing traffic as well as content from real sites.
Well, it turns out Tory minister Grant Shapps is behind many Splogs.
Yes, a government minister is a spammer and snake-oil “Internet Marketing Guru”, using the false name of “Michael Green”.
If you run a business under a false name, the default assumption has to be that you’re doing something dodgy, doesn’t it?
Two things immediately come to mind. Firstly, the whole thing is a perfect metaphor for the moral bankrupcy of the Conservative party. Secondly, it shows the establishment’s double standards when it comes to intellectual property. We have a government prepared to extradite Richard O’Dwyer to the US to face a lengthy prison term for copyright violation “because downloading a movie without paying is just like stealing a car”. Then we have a minister whose whole business is founded on theft of other people’s intellectual property. Seems that different standards apply if it’s the “little people” doing the stealing rather than being stolen from.