Some people are smart. Some think they’re smarter.
A few of you might have seen the following video:

It appeared online at the end of April this year, supposedly being recorded by a web cam near Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin. As there is no web cam at that place, that video was obviously a funny fake. Was it?
More than that. It was an attempt in doing some viral marketing by spreading a series of videos and starting discussions about it. As it turned out, it all was part of some campaign for dog food of Pedigree. So far, nothing wrong, I think.

The “wrongeness” starts when you look at the amount and kind of comments across a couple of blogs and forums that started this and/or tried to keep the discussion going: Lots of literally identical comments from the same IP-addresses coming, though they’re claiming to be different persons. I know that, because our site was one of those being hit with lots of those meaningless comments. Some people, would call this spam.
What a nice way of saying thanks for picking up the video, isn’t it?

Other sites those comments were posted at are Hauptstadtblog or Spreeblick, who (wisely?) ignored the completely off-topic comments by “Sabrina”.

So did the people behind this campaign think they’re so smart, they can fool the online community without being caught? Probably. Will there come more of this stuff, that is better disguised and indistinguishable from the normal crap comments on the web? Most likely.