Here, in a single link, is why the Internet as it is cannot work, why this open network can never be the unbiased universal source for informing humanity, at least, not in the long run.

Why? Because we are right back to our old friend the Trust Thread, and because it is only a matter of time before shill-squads like Canada Blog Friends (sic) have invaded Wikipedia and the rest.

Canada Blog Friends hopes to attract new members to help promote our culture online. This is a paying opportunity for bloggers with established blogs.
[ Craigslist: Toronto Jobs ]

Seeing as Canada tends half a decade behind the trendlines in online innovations, it's my guess a lot of what may be being read about elections and such south of the border may not be precisely what it pretends to be. True, any online material does demand a certain BS-detection Turing Test sense by the consumer, but in this case, we've got leagues of seemingly unaffiliated cash motivated personalities playing the spambot role, and thereby that much more difficult to spot.

The Rise of Unskilled Paid Content

People playing the 'bots, and because they are people, they also live outside that business-code which requires products live up to their claims, which is quite beyond some nutrician-suppliment guy claiming magic results; via these second-order blogshill minions, a manufacturer could claim anything for their product, and have it be dismissed in court as mere well-meaning blog-static.

Here's the shill pitch, and you must admit, for anyone in the economic margins who is looking at some fast cash, it would have to be a compelling offer; you can get maybe, maybe $50 for crafting a newspaper article, and the last dozen times I was asked to write for an e-zine, it was "for the exposure" ... and along comes Rob, no questions asked, no credentials, no expertise required, he gives you all you need, you just have to put it into your own style and here ya go a fast $7 a pop, as often as you like, even more if you can up your google rank multiplier:

Hello my name is Rob Campbell, and I'm building a comprehensive list of the best bloggers in Canada, which I hope to employ, at premium rates, to promote Canadian culture online.

My program pays bloggers to post about Canadian cultural events, books and movies.

Last month I had over 20 people help me promote the Margaret Laurence book turned movie, The Stone Angel for Alliance Atlantis.

His email, if indeed 'Rob' is a he, goes on to proudly list a stack of URLs where this movie was praised all over the place in just the same false pretense as William Gibson's pub-chat ladies in Pattern Matching, or what Daniel Pinchbeck is proposing for a market-blitz to boost interest in his counter-culture Reality Sandwich ... only at least Daniel has the good sense and human ethics to only recruit actual fans of his e'zine.

Rob, on the other hand, will apparently take anyone, just so long as they say what they are told to say.

Danger Will Robinson

Remember, I was totally right about automated blog comment-spam (many famous blogkit developers said I was mistaken) and my essay on the death of trackback was not only prophetic, but still ranks as my most read story. What I predict now is that these marketers will soon realize that the blog-realm is largely an abandoned wasteland, not because there isn't good content, there is plenty, but because the signal-to-noise ratio in the blogspace has plummetted. Even without their help. More to the point, they will bound into this space with the same zeal they had when Usenet was trampled, when Email was trampled, and their next target will be Wikipedia (to sidestep any direct trail back to their 'client' as the source of the positive reviews) and, yes, into Facebook too.

Remember in there, in my essays on Trust, the basic rule of networks as they grow: All networks leak. Some people will just invite anyone, others will invite members by mistake, or out of just not knowing any better, and as each of these mycelial roots gets in the door, the contamination spreads, exponentially.

No, I don't know how to fix it. Maybe it has it its root our old friend situational trust or positive reputation systems and self-representation online, and maybe bounces us back to rethinking the fraud of universal identity and that black-white yes/no binary Facebook relation toggle Is you is or is you ain't my friend?, I don't really know at this point, but I am saying we better start thinking about how we're going to fix it.

and soon.