Drapetomaniacs

Recently, the FCC ignored public, democratic desire and made it easier for large organizations to monopolize news markets. This means, of course, that information will be coming from fewer and fewer sources. This is an unusual concern for Americans, but when we condemn Cuba for state owned media, this is why. Is there a difference between one government, or three corporations controlling the flow of information in a country?

In the world of reputation, Cox Networks has showed how large networks can make stupid decisions. In Google PageRank, you try to get many reputable links over time and increasing your reputation as a resource. That is helped by gaining links from other sites over a period of time. In this case, Cox registered a new site no December 7th and wants to manipulate it's reputation. So, it can take advantage supposedly reputable sites like the Austin Statesman that it owns and GoogleBomb its links to a higher reputation.

At the bottom of their newspaper pages, you can see that they have added irrelevant links to their site. Most people won't even notice the links at the very bottom where you usually find "About Us" or plain text site maps.

Cox has done on the internet what people fear they will do with their media, which is taint basic reputation and trust.