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Well the simple answer is no. The ability to view which IP addresses have been editing pages in Wikipedia has always existed, but now a student from Cal Tech has gone ahead and not only simplified the process, but has also created a searchable database of IP addresses making changes to pages. The website, Wikipedia Scanner, is straightforward and easy to use, just one warning though, the site is very time consuming!

But in a good way!

It’s fun and interesting searching through pages and IP addresses to find who is changing what- you never know what you might uncover!

For instance, did you know Sony once changed Halo 3’s Wikipedia page to say “Halo 3 won’t look any better than Halo 2?”

Ouch…

The funniest part is that the list goes on and on, from corporations too government agencies, it seems everyone is making changes to Wikipedia pages.

Happy hunting everyone!!

A Google lawyer announced on Friday that they will apply video fingerprinting technology to YouTube by September.

This comes as great news to countless of video content producers, that are now seeing their copyright videos on YouTube without their permission.

The video screening technology will consist of a computer system which will automatically scan all videos uploaded to YouTube and compare them to a collection of digital fingerprints built by Google. According, to Google the process will only take a few minutes to scan and determine its acceptance onto YouTube.

This is definitely a large step forward for YouTube and one that will hopefully help to spend less time in the courtroom and more time revolutionizing the Internet.

There have been some recent revelations (see article) on Whole Foods CEO John Mackey (aka “rahodeb”) who, from 1999 to 2006, made several anonymous postings on financial forums and sites putting down his company’s rival competitor Wild Oats. Among other postings, Mackey wrote that Wild Oates’ management “clearly doesn’t know what it is doing” and that the company “has no value and no future.” Oddly enough, Whole Foods announced this past February that they were buying Wild Oates for $565 million - perhaps the tofu-organic equivalent of “no value.”

According to the article, Whole Foods is saying 1) that many of Mackey’s comment, in that they were written over the course of many years across the web, are being taken out of context and 2) that the comments were Mackey’s personal comments and not those of the company. Uhhh, sure. Semantically, that may be true. But if this is the person who runs said company, might there be some cross over? I think maybe.

To be realistic here, I highly doubt that any of Mackey’s anonymous comments had any effect on stock price or investors’ handling of their Wild Oats stocks. Nonetheless, it’s still bad PR and it reflects poorly on the company and its leader.

Recently Mackey has been blasting the FTC on the Whole Foods’ blog about their desire to block his company’s purchase of Wild Oats because of anti-trust concerns. While this may be raising eyebrows in some corners of the business world, from a social media standpoint this is certainly more proper behavior. We know who you are, we know who you work for and you can say whatever you want.

There have certainly been several examples of companies misbehaving in the social media space, often pretending NOT to be who they are to be more credible. (The irony being, of course, that once they are discovered the company’s credibility is shot.) This will likely continue until the end of time. In the same way that person to person interaction requires some feeling out before you start taking stock tips or buying a new sneaker brand, people in online spheres are pretty savvy and know not to believe every post in every forum. But not everyone knows…Ask me if my mom would know how to spot something online that might be a solicitation from an anonymous marketer and I’d say no. To her, and to many, the internet is where the information is…and it’s all right.

Surely people will continue to get fooled (not just my mom, mind you - me, you and everyone else…and multiple times). For small companies or individuals with no reputation at stake, aside from integrity there’s just not much stopping them from lying to people online. It really will be incumbent upon all of us online, just as in person, to pay attention to what information we’re taking in. But for large companies, it’s just not smart business to handle social media in this way. Don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want my company’s CEO pretending to be someone else online and talking stock tips about my company and its competitors. Mackey and Whole Foods lose credibility online instantly.

…on the bright side, however, if no respect from the investor community he did score himself some more female fans with comment like this - “I like Mackey’s haircut,” “Rahodeb” said. “I think he looks cute!” (See full WSJ Article)