DiY Dark Arts and the extraordinary delusions of crowds

This is simply the best article I have seen on TechCrunch in months - its a "Dark Arts" PR company running through all the tricks used to create those "viral" effects.

I don't know what is worse - reading the comments and seeing the astounding naivete of so many of the commentators*, or Mike Arrington's comment that:

I will post a longer response to this later, but frankly I’m disgusted by this.

Oh c'mon Mike - methinks you protest too much. We talk to PRtards and they tell us this goes on, and we're total outsiders compared to the big sites. Frankly I'm glad its up there, its back to having real conversations (which Howard Lindzon relishes**...)

(For the record - we don't do this stuff, but have helped clients see when it is being used by competitors)

However, now that its in the open its bad news for the Dark Artistes

The Wild West days of Lonely Girl and Ask A Ninja are over. You simply can’t expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them go viral on their own, even if you think you have the best videos ever. These days, achieving true virality takes serious creativity, some luck, and a lot of hard work. So, my advice: fire your PR firm and do it yourself.

* I often wonder about some of the blog commentators on things like Beacon etc - are they astroturfing, fan-sumers or just thick - now I know - many are just totally naive.

** Tip of hat to Howard for this discovery - truth be told I don't read TC very often anymore, it seems increasingly to be PR puff...more of this stuff guys!

Postscript...tsk tsk...GigaOm's NewTeeVee (another thing I read far less often) has only now (a day later) covered this story....but in the comments section there is a list of the companies served by said company (apparently they were pulled off Linked In - but you'd think a Dark Arts company knows about caching)