I remember seeing sporadic bursts of activity here when Digg, one of the big aggregator sites, would link to something here, but I haven’t seen that in a while — but now I learn that there is a fanatically active group of conservative haters at work over there. They call themselves Digg Patriots (“patriots” is one of those words, like “family”, that usually get appropriated by people with an extremely narrow view of what it means.) They take advantage of a feature of Digg: in order for an article to get elevated to the front page, where it will get a lot of attention, it has to be voted up; however, Digg also allows people to vote down, or bury, articles. The Digg Patriots take advantage of this to organize what amounts to poll-crashing to suppress views they dislike. Obviously, I think poll-crashing is a fine and fair activity, except that in this case they take advantage of a Digg mechanism to bury their opposition, which isn’t exactly in the spirit of free speech. And they’re picking on me!

The DP group searches Digg for any articles from websites they want to drown out, sites such as Salon, News Junkie Post, Talking Points Memo, FreakOutNation, Five Thirty Eight, ThePublicRecord, Rawstory, The Nation, Media Matters for America, PoliticusUSA, Alternet, Fire Dog Lake, Political Carnival, TruthOut, DailyKos, The Joshua Blog, The Brad Blog, Huffington Post, Science Blogs, Smirking Chimp, Down With Tyranny, Crooks and Liars, MarioPiperni, Buzzflash, Bob Cesca’s REALLY AWESOME Blog, and The New York Times.

The Digg Patriots are rather sleazy — they use multiple aliases, violate various Digg rules, and actively work to get around bans — and they do try to suppress some good blogs and news sites, but I don’t think they can have that much influence on everything, and are mainly a threat to individuals they target, which makes them nothing more than petty bullies.

One thing we can do to counter them rather easily is to use those aggregators ourselves. You’ll notice that every site at Scienceblogs has this little bar across the bottom of each article:

Use it now and then, if you’re familiar with how those aggregators work. Clicking on the “Reddit” button, for instance, will pop up a window with the URL and title of the article filled in for you (that is, you are a registered Reddit user), and a button allows you to submit stuff to that site. Digg is tucked away under the “email+more” button.

The other thing you can do is browse those sites and search for the sources conveniently listed by the Digg Patriots above, and if you like them, vote them up. It’s a good way to help promote good sources, and as we all know, the NY Times needs as much help as it can get.

I’m not too concerned about the general effects of a group of know-nothings reflexively voting down liberal sites — they will be drowned out by the rising tide. But where they can do real damage is when they concentrate their activities on single groups or individuals. There is one fellow called R.J. Carter or CaptCarrot who went on a YouTube crusade against a youth group accusing them of promoting pedophilia and otherwise just generally trashing them with libelous accusations, and got accounts shut down and hurt innocent people, and that’s serious.

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What’s this? Mike the Mad Biologist posted on the same thing at the same time?

Many of the Scienceblog expatriates plus a few others have formed a new collective, Scientopia. It looks like a good bunch of people and a new and maybe better bottom-up approach to organizing a blog network — I’ll be reading them and looking forward to their growth.

• Adventures in Ethics and Science
• Attack Polymerase
• Book of Trogool
• Candid Engineer in Academia
• Chemical BiLOLogy
• Child’s Play
• Christina’s LIS Rant
• Drugmonkey
• Galactic Interactions
• Good Math/Bad Math
• Neurotic Physiology
• Professor in Training
• Prof-Like Substance
• Sanitized for Your Protection
• Skulls in the Stars
• The Brain Confounds Everything
• The Questionable Authority
• The Urban Ethnographer
• This Scientific Life
• Thus Spake Zuska
• Voltage Gate
• White Coat Underground
• WhizBANG

Although, I do have to say that I’m not a fan of their published code. It throws around the word “respect” way too much, which happens to be one of those words that annoys me, because it is too easily assumed when it should be earned. I don’t respect everyone who blogs on science, and not everyone respects me (nor should they)…but it does put me on edge when a group announces a demand for mutual respect and also lays out a protocol for eviction, when I know that several of the people in the collective had little respect for some others on the Sb network. I have no respect for the pretense of respect.

But let’s all hope for the best and much success to Scientopia.

Jen McCreight is participating in that masochistic exercise in prolonged blogging called Blogathon, all to raise money for charity. Take a look, donate if you can, at least give her a little sympathy.

The case of the various kinds of blogs hosted on ScienceBlogs has come up on Newsweek, and I get quoted trying to explain how I’m unperturbed by a couple of institutional blogs here.

Not all bloggers feel this way, Myers included. “We’ve known about those [institutional blogs] for some time–they aren’t a problem,” he wrote in an e-mail to NEWSWEEK. “Those sites were set up under the same conditions as the blogs of corporate scientist Mark Chu-Carroll, who works at Google, and university scientist PZ Myers, who works at the University of Minnesota. … [The Pepsi blog blurred] the boundary between advertising and content. I agree that the institutional blogs also blur that boundary, just not quite as much. I can’t insist that their blogs be labeled as advertisements, unless I want my blog marked as an ad for the University of Minnesota, or Chu-Carroll’s as an ad for Google. It’s complicated and messy.”

There is some confusion out there, however. I do not claim to represent the University of Minnesota. Mark Chu-Carroll did not claim to speak for Google. My point was that if you take any blogger and look at the chains of affiliations they have (as we all do), we do not try to argue that every possible connection is a direct conflict of interest that demands a prominent disclaimer on the web page.

We ought to reserve the term “ad” for situations where an interest has paid money to be promoted, as PepsiCo did. The Weizmann Institute did not. Google did not pay to have Chu-Carroll peddle the company line, and he didn’t. The University of Minnesota did not pay to have me scare away recruit potential students, although I may have done one or the other, accidentally. Weizmann, SETI, and Brookhaven have that in common with me and Chu-Carroll, and none of us cross the ethical barrier in the same way that PepsiCo did.

I actually think it’s a good idea for institutions to have blogs at places like Scienceblogs. One thing I mentioned (but was not quoted) in my email to Newsweek is that the real challenge for institutional blogs is for them to be interesting. I rather like this quote from Carl Zimmer that summarizes their problem:

I do not, for example, assume that a piece of research is actually important just because a press release says it is. Imagine a press release with the headline, “Minor study published that is really not all it claims to be.” Such things just don’t exist.

This isn’t exactly schadenfreude, it’s more like merely recognizing the ungainly nature of the beast — but blog networks are always going to struggle a bit. Take a look at these posts from the Nature Network. It’s not doom-and-gloom, it’s just wrestling with the medium, as we’ve experienced here in recent weeks.

I do have a solution for any financial problems, though: we just need to peddle more T&A and celebrity gossip, like Huffpo. Isn’t that a bit illiberal, though, to build your brand on the backs of salacious stories about women? Not to mention the quackery and woo.

Although I guess I am also guilty of building an audience with blatant T&A^*, too.

^*Only in my case, that stands for “tentacles and arms”.

As some of you know, there was a long-running contretemps at Chris Mooney’s Intersocktion blog — Mooney took a comment by someone named “Tom Johnson” as evidence that the New Atheists were inciting all kinds of destructive fury and ran with it, promoting it as a solid strike against the same targets he took on in his sad little book, Unscientific America. Then it turned out that much of the conversation on this topic at the Intersocktion was driven by this same fellow, who was posting under multiple pseudonyms. And finally it turned out that a noisy little blog titled “You’re Not Helping”, which castigated New Atheists for “not helping”, was authored by this same little weasel, and that the conversations that went on there were also between sock puppets.

It’s been quite the embarrassment for the gullible Mr Mooney, and of course “Tom Johnson” has really demolished his own reputation.

“Johnson” has apparently sent out apologies to a few of the people he dishonestly slandered (I’m not among them; I guess he doesn’t like me at all). Now Jerry Coyne has dug up details on the background, including having a conversation with “Johnson’s” grad school advisor.

I wash my hands completely of the ugly little anti-atheist muckraker and will not be discussing him further in any context — he’s dead to me. The only good thing to come out of the whole sordid mess was a tarnishing of the reputation of that other anti-New Atheist crusader, Mooney. And now the “Johnson” affair is over.

Blizzard, makers of the games Starcraft and World of Warcraft, is about to change their forum policies and require the display of real names, basically creating a massive privacy leak if you buy a silly game and go online to get some tech support. There’s an excellent summary of why this was a really bad idea here, and apparently Blizzard has an inkling of possible problems — they’re waffling about whether to publish employee names under their new terms. If it’s not a problem for users, why should employees get an exemption?

Also, I’ve been sent a few links to sites where people are demonstrating what can be done with names and a little information: they’re digging up all kinds of amazing info about Blizzard employees. Photos, family pictures, home addresses, financial statements, shoe sizes, wedding registries, children’s school addresses, that sort of thing. I’m not going to post those links here! Personally, I’ve been very casual about my privacy, but we have to respect people’s decision to avoid public entanglements of this sort—and buying a garish box at Electronics Boutique for some casual entertainment should not be a tacit agreement to allow stalkers to track you down.

Bly is the fellow who put Scienceblogs together, and to his credit, one of his responses to the heat generated by the whole PepsiCo debacle is to step forward and be more open. His blog is at Science is Culture — go say hello. Or tell him what to do to fix everything.