The article comments on a peer reviewed paper in Vaccine that analyzes the “tactics and tropes” of the anti-vaccine movement. Unfortunately I don’t have access to that journal to comment on the paper directly. But I can say the author of the Slate article could have avoided some pitfalls had he availed himself of the large body of skeptic literature in addition to that one paper.

News flash: we’ve been fighting these battles for decades, and are well familiar with the tactics listed. We’ve even been going head-to-head with these communities in Google and on Twitter and in the rest of Web 2.0, using the very same techniques. The evidence easy to find in Google, I’m not sure why Morozov can’t see it.

In the rest of this article I’ll point out how the piece’s proposed solution lacks vision, and suggest some other avenues that don’t require Google to get involved.

Skeptics Ignored

Like many who casually visit the topic areas of skepticism, but do not spend any substantive time studying them, Morozov seems to assume that no-one other than intellectuals and government workers have any interest in what the merchants of misinformation are up to.

He somehow manages to ignore the 45+ year history of the organized scientific skepticism movement, which has been long been battling this type of misinformation through efforts of non-profit groups, two different national magazines and hundreds of blogs and podcasts.

He laments that advocates of fringe believes have “have branched out into manipulating search engines, editing Wikipedia entries” to push their ideas on an unsuspecting public. But it somehow never occurs to him that others might be using the same techniques to push back as well.

Indeed, this blog and others (such as Susan Gerbic’s wiki project) have long been assisting skeptics in going head to head with believers in actively editing Wikipedia, ranking highly in Google, as well as in other Web 2.0 efforts.

Missed Research Opportunities

It’s mystifying to me how Morozov completely missed this effort. It can be found using some of the very search terms he mentions as examples in the article, as well as closely related terms.

For instance he suggests the search “is global warming real” is a potential gateway to a fringe community. But the organic Google results include such reality-based sites as discovery.com, nationalgeographic.com and straightdope.com. It is naive to assume that those sites appear entirely by accident, while the global warming denial sites (which also appear nearby) have been manipulated into position.

If you search on the name Andrew Wakefield (whose photo graces the article) you do find several believer and supporter sites. But you also find Brian Deer’s investigation which led to Wakefield’s downfall as well as Respectful Insolence and Pharyngula, both well known skeptical blogs. This is not luck or happenstance, those bloggers have worked very hard to get that content there.

Several of Morozov’s suggested searches return Wikipedia articles among the results, even as the first result. The search term “who caused 9/11?” actually returns two different Wikipedia articles in the first two slots.

But again Morozov misses a research opportunity here. If you actually read those Wikipedia articles, you will find that they are very reality based. Indeed, Wikipedia takes a rather dim view of “fringe theories” even dedicating a special discussion area for editors to take note when they are getting out of hand and to coordinate response.

As I have pointed out on this blog, Wikipedia’s own rules are skewed toward reality and against peddlers of misinformation. As long as skeptics step up and take the time to enforce the established rules on that site, fringe theories should never hold sway permanently in any article.

One Insight

I do want to congratulate Morozov for one insightful observation, with which I entirely agree. He makes it near the center of the article:

What to do then? Well, perhaps, it’s time to accept that many of these communities aren’t going to lose core members regardless of how much science or evidence is poured on them. Instead, resources should go into thwarting their growth by targeting their potential—rather than existent—members.

As long-time readers of this blog know, I could not agree more. I said so in the TAM6 talk which was the kickoff for this blog (see 3:45 in that video). Most of the techniques that I espouse on this blog are designed with the above concept in mind.


A host of issues from human psychology such as cognitive dissonance, various cognitive biases, logical fallacies and conspiracy thinking largely prevent true believers from seeing the many errors they continue to make in their thinking. Thus no amount of logic from skeptics can help them.

Unfortunately, after this insight, Morozov engages in more fallacious thinking as he composes his solution.

Only Two Solutions?

Morozov can only think of two solutions: build browser-based tools that can flag dubious information and ask Google to fix the problem for us. There are problems with both suggestions, as proposed in the article.

First, why does he assume that browser-based tools would naturally be immune to the poisoning of search results that deniers attempt? Due to the huge scale issues inherent in fact-checking the web, most such tools are likely to include a crowd-sourcing element.

The very example he gives, an academic project called Dispute Finder was full of 9/11 conspiracy theory information the last time I took a look at it. It also seems to have been abandoned by its creator for all practical purposes, as the Firefox plugin is no longer available for download.

Another effort, called Hypothes.is (which I have blogged about here) has been proceeding very slowly and carefully in their early implementation efforts, no doubt in an effort to navigate around these same issues. I’m cautiously optimistic about their chances of success, but (like Wikipedia) the editors of Hypothes.is will need to be ever vigilant of fringe theories.

His primary idea is to get Google to flag fringe theories on the search engine result pages. He cites Google’s recent efforts to include suicide hotline information in relevant searches as precedent.

I would point out a counter-precedent. For years some rather unsavory hate sites have ranked very highly for the searches on the word “jew” in Google. Despite many public calls to manually alter the result, Google chose to address the problem in an interesting way (which you can see at that link). It purchased an advertisement in its own ad placement service titled “Offensive Search Results” that always appears when you make that search. The ad leads to an explanatory page. More recently, due to simple search engine optimization techniques (aka “manipulation of search results”) the very same page actually appears as an organic result as well.

It may seem like a dodge for Google to respond this way, but the Anti-Defamation League complimented Google on their response. More importantly, the response they made is simpler and more scalable.

And it doesn’t require Google’s permission! Skeptics can use these very same techniques. Indeed, the technique of placing an ad in Google results is already being used by science-based non-profits. If you use another of the putative search terms from Morozov’s article, “vaccination leads to autism” you might well see one or more of the following ads right at the top of the results right now:

This undoctored screen shot shows one instance where I saw all three! All three of these lead to reality-based websites unaffiliated with Google. This is no accident, this is skeptic activism.

Many Other Solutions

Morozov’s paltry two solutions show a lack of vision, both in their number and in the implication that neither exists in usable form. He speaks of both in the future tense, as if they have yet to be fully realized.

But the browser plug-in already exists, albeit in a slightly different form than he describes. Web of Trust (WOT) has been downloaded approximately 30 million times, and can give ratings on websites that often warn of dubious content right within Google search results and elsewhere. For instance, if a WOT user searches on “risks of vaccination”, here’s what part of the Google result screen looks like:

That red circle is an “unfavorable” rating from Web of Trust. Many of these negative ratings of denialist websites in WOT are the direct result of the efforts of skeptics.

As for other possible responses, I’ve already talked about search engine optimization efforts undertaken by skeptics as well as our Wikipedia efforts. Thousands of skeptics (including myself) edit Wikipedia every day.

Skeptics also have a huge presence on social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus, and some make a point of addressing false claims head-on whenever they occur. Because of new social-based search tools such as Search Plus Your World, these efforts by skeptics will actually start to change the results for their friends and acquaintances. Deniers may stay inside their own bubbles, but skeptics can reach others this way.

And there is much more, much of it documented on this blog.

Conclusion

I do agree with Evgeny Morozov that misinformation on the web is a pernicious problem. Indeed, the very reason I started this blog was to combat it.

However, I wish he had looked beyond one academic paper and realized that there are already thousands of people ahead of him on the battlefield actively engaged in the fight against it.

There is no need for a nuclear option, dropped from orbit by Google. We’ve got a land war well underway. Evgeny, you’re free to join us. Grab a rifle.

In the spirit of this blog, I’ve got a year in review post coming later that will be a how-to about measuring your own skeptical contribution for the year. But for this one I just thought I’d look at what my top posts in each venue (blog, social media and so on) were and how much traffic or attention they got.

As I’ve pointed out before, raw traffic levels are often a misused indicator. Traffic can surge for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with the quality or importance of the post itself, so it can be dangerous to let yourself be guided entirely by “ratings” as it were.

That having been said, the traffic levels may have some a lesson to teach us (albeit one that we have seen before on this blog). Read on.

Blog Posts (skeptools)

The top posts on this blog are dominated by the first two, which were both responses to the Mabus problem. Number one is the epic story of Mabus, posted on the day his arrest became public knowledge. It was linked to by the New York Times and such Twitter luminaries as Jay Rosen, and used as source material by many other news stories you can find in the August wrap-up. It continues to get about 50% of all the clicks this blog receives.

1. Case Study: How a notorious spammer was brought down by Twitter (57K views)
2. How to filter persistent trolls (and spammers) on Twitter (7K views)
3. Gamification and skepticism (2.5K views)
4. Digital Guide to The Amazing Meeting 9 (TAM9) (1K views)
5. Digital Guide to Dragon*Con 2011 (1K views)
6. Web of Trust is a useful tool for skeptics (1K views)

The blog as a whole got 86,000 views in 2011, not bad for a very special purpose niche blog that only had 31 total posts for the year. Those five posts above got about 69,000 of those views, again the vast majority of them going to the Mabus case study.

I think there are some lost gems down in there, please explore and see what you’ve missed. I suggest visiting the metrics category. I’m very proud of the work I did there to actually measure what skeptics are doing online.

Blog Posts (randi.org)

I was appointed a Research Fellow of the James Randi Educational Foundation in June, and so I’ve been blogging for their site as well. This provides a good outlet for things I write that don’t exactly fit the niche target of this site, but are still of interest to skeptics. I’ve posted 19 times at randi.org, here are the top 5 by hit count:

1. Skeptic History: A Big Birthday (14K views)
2. Skeptic History: Archaeological Fakes (12K views)
3. “Dave Mabus” Diagnosed and In Treatment (7.7K views)
4. My Skeptic Elevator Pitch (6.8K views)
5. UK Alt-Med Practitioners Are Feeling Pain (6.7K views)

Again, Mabus makes an appearance. But it’s an interesting mix, and a good example of how traffic numbers can be confounded by other factors (such as time of day posted, what else is going on that day, and so on). I never would have guessed that one of my small Skeptic History posts (which are just short bits of trivia) would have more views than the more newsworthy items.

In any case, the 19 posts over at JREF got a total of 89,000 views (at this writing), slightly outpacing this entire blog for the year – with fewer posts that only appeared in the second half of the year.

The lost gem in this, way down at #12 in the list, was Skeptic Metrics: Measuring Our Impact Online. I think that post has tons of great links and ideas, and summarizes what I’ve been doing in my metrics-related articles mentioned above.

Wikipedia articles

I wrote a post back in July about how traffic statistics show the importance of Wikipedia to skepticism. The ghost of that article is about to haunt this one.

I decided to look at the Wikipedia article traffic for the dozen articles (half skeptic, half unrelated) which I authored myself. All but one of these articles I actually created, so if I hadn’t taken action they would not be in Wikipedia at all. Only one of them actually was posted in 2011, so most of them were available the entire year.

The total traffic on my dozen Wikipedia articles was about 86,000 views – almost the same as the view total for the more than fifty posts (plus the home page and miscellany) on this blog. If you toss out the outliers (like the massively popular Mabus post, and my article about a historic building on Wikipedia), there’s not a single article on this blog that hasn’t been outpaced by one of my Wikipedia articles this year:

1. George Hrab (9.4K views)
2. Richard Saunders (7K views)
3. Harriet Hall (5K views)
4. Karen Stollznow (5K views in 6 months)
5. Robert A. Baker (3.3K views)

Yet more evidence of the incredible power that Wikipedia has to put eyes in front of skeptical topics. I could have written any of those articles as a blog post here, indeed it would have been far easier because I wouldn’t have had to follow Wikipedia’s sometimes labyrinthine rules. But by taking the time to get them properly posted over there, I got that content a much larger audience that will continue to grow. And I hope I’ve helped promote the skeptic community to the general public.

Social Media (Twitter)

It’s not possible to get true hit counts on social media posts, for a number of technical reasons. On Twitter, however, you can often gauge the popularity of a post on the basis of what other users do with it. If they mark it as a favorite or send it on to their own followers (“retweet” it), that’s a good indication they liked the post. Based on those measures and counts provided by Favstar.fm here were my top social media posts of 2011:

Wondering how #Mabus finally arrested? Skeptical activism on Twitter! I provide background & details: bit.ly/MabusDone—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) August 17, 2011

(10 favorites, 41+ retweets)

What's the harm in believing Wakefield on MMR?
Measles outbreak in Leeds.
http://bbc.in/h0ls9D /via @Blue_Wode #vaxfax—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) March 23, 2011

(6 favorites, 37 retweets)

What's the harm in seeing a chiropractor? 30 yr old man DEAD due to neck manipulation. http://bit.ly/oQHvWP /via @Blue_Wode—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) July 28, 2011

(5 favorites, 33 retweets)

What's the harm in skipping an MMR shot? 1st Swedish case of congenital rubella in 30 yrs. bit.ly/v9tASq /via @lizditz—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) December 28, 2011

(2 favorites, 35 retweets)

"Plants have been trying to kill us, not cure us" says botanist. Herbalism is based on myth. http://bit.ly/gXZS67 /via @lecanardnoir—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) April 20, 2011

(13 favorites, 20 retweets)

BREAKING NEWS: Bogus bracelet business @PowerBalance filed for bankruptcy on Friday! Owes $57M. t.co/TA2gz50w—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 21, 2011

(2 favorites, 30 retweets)

What's the harm in skipping a measles shot? Natalie died, Angelina is dying. bit.ly/tawtAf /by @justthevax—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 08, 2011

(2 favorites, 30 retweets)

Skeptic History: Happy birthday to skeptic James Randi, born August 7, 1928. http://bit.ly/ngIOuo #TAM9 @jref—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) August 07, 2011

(1 favorite, 31 retweets)

What's the harm in visiting a chiropractor? Singer Alannah Myles suffers spinal damage. http://bit.ly/m0VV7Z /via @globalnamespace—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) July 05, 2011

(3 favorites, 28 retweets)

What's the harm in alternative medicine? Steve Jobs delayed surgery in 2004 on a naturopath's advice. bit.ly/qn12tW—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) October 06, 2011

(3 favorites, 27 retweets)

Once again, we see Mabus making his appearance amongst an interesting mix of posts. Of course you can get these as I post them by subscribing on Twitter using the button at right or the any of the follow buttons you see here.

Watch this space soon for a how-to post that will explain how I gathered the stats above as well as other numbers about my online skeptical contributions in 2011.

If you were busy too and missed some of the action during the month, here’s a way to catch up.  This is the monthly roundup – links to all the content I’ve been involved with in the last month. It includes this blog as well as the material I post on other blogs, my podcasting activities, my best posts on Twitter as well as key shout-outs or mentions elsewhere.

Read on to see what you missed!

Blogging

Here were my blog posts this month.

• December 6: JREF: Skeptic History: Bermuda Triangle
• December 9: Skeptools: Where to Get Your Dose of Skeptic History (See tab at top)
• December 10: Skeptools: What’s the Harm? (See tab at top)

Mentions and follow-ups on other blogs:

• December 20: Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia: William B. Davis ~ Page Makeover

Podcasting & Video

I contributed a Skeptic History segment to this episode of Skepticality:

• December 13: #172: Magnetic Force

Some shout-outs and mentions on other audio & video casts:

• December 6: SkepticampDC: A Few More Nibbles from the Whole Tooth by Michael Cornett
  Technically posted Nov. 27. Shoutouts to What’s the Harm at 13:34, 28:48 and 30:28. Thanks Michael!
• December 26: Caustic Soda: Quackery
  Lots of harm stories, and a nice plug for What’s the Harm at the end. Thanks guys!
• December 30: InKredulous: InKredulous #11
  The host, Andy Lewis, used Skeptic History items from the JREF Today in Skeptic History iPhone app as basis of a round of questions. Thanks for the plug!
• December 31: Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe: Episode #337 (around 28:45 into the episode)
  A nice shout-out to me for my role in the apprehension of David Mabus. Thanks, Rebecca!

Social Media

I posted on Twitter:

• 126 regular tweets, including:
  • 22 ”What’s the harm in…?” stories
  • 31 Skeptic History facts
• Plus 125 replies to other Twitter posts

Here are highlights, the tweets that were retweeted the most. It starts, as it often does, some compelling What’s the Harm stories:

What's the harm in the #Burzynski Clinic? Many have raised funds to go, only to die anyway. bit.ly/ry2B3r /via @rjblaskiewicz—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) December 01, 2011

(~10 retweets)

What's the harm in Scientology? More details on the woman imprisoned for a decade. bit.ly/sKXFyt

—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) December 09, 2011

A computer security warning:

Pro Tip: If you get an Adobe upgrade notice today that has the word "official" in it; it isn't. It's a hacker. Delete. #infosec #security—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) December 20, 2011

(~10 retweets)

A humorous incident on Wikipedia (which you can see here for yourself)

Just restored some @Wikipedia text that was "deleted for citing a television drama series". It was a reference to "Gray's Anatomy". #derp—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) December 20, 2011

(~10 retweets)

Leon Festinger is a popular man:

Skeptic History: A cult's failed apocalypse Dec. 21, 1954 led to the theory of cognitive dissonance. bit.ly/szObQA—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) December 21, 2011

(~12 retweets)

Vaccines continue to be a big issue for skeptics:

Anti-vaccine group NVIC is at it again. Tell ABC that running their ad in Times Square is a bad idea. Sign: chn.ge/tjBCdI #vaxfax—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) December 28, 2011

(~20 retweets)

What's the harm in skipping an MMR shot? 1st Swedish case of congenital rubella in 30 yrs. bit.ly/v9tASq /via @lizditz—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) December 28, 2011

(~34 retweets)

To get these as I post them, you should follow me on Twitter here.

Crowdsourcing Contributions

Here were my contributions to various projects this month:

I contributed 98 edits to Wikipedia.

I rated 10 sites on Web of Trust and left 3 site scorecard comments.

I made 16 edits to the Skeptic History database. It now has 1,403 items.

What, ho? Now we head into 2012!

I post some material to all three but a different mix of posts to each as appropriate to the features of that site. Those features keep changing, but for a long time I’ve personally preferred Twitter as my main social media conduit. I post the most on Twitter.

One thing I like is that Twitter is dead simple. Facebook seems intent on adding more and more gadgets and features every time I look at it, and often it just seems too much. It’s like the overkill of launching Photoshop just to crop a photo. But Twitter stays with a bare bones feature set. I admire that.

The default public nature of Twitter, where everyone can see all your posts (unless you take action otherwise) is a key to its value. I wrote back in August about how this allowed community action to take place against a spammer that wouldn’t have been nearly as easy on the other services. That action resulted in a police arrest.

This post is nowhere near that (in scope or length). It’s just about how I managed to pay a nice compliment to my girlfriend on national television via the medium of Twitter and the help of some friends. Read on, it’s a fun story.

It started with a tweet sent by Prof. Bruce M. Hood back on December 9:

We're covering Twitter in the Ri Xmas Lectures. "What's the point of Twitter?" Your answer could feature on telly #RiXmasQues please RT—
bruce hood (@profbrucehood) December 09, 2011

Not being a resident of England, I had never before heard of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. They are a long tradition, and have been given in the past by such luminaries as Michael Faraday, Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins.

I’d met Prof. Hood when he spoke at The Amazing Meeting 8 in Las Vegas in 2010. He’s a fantastic person, and is doing fascinating research into human psychology and how the mind develops beliefs in the supernatural and so on. His first book which is called SuperSense (in the UK) or The Science of Superstition (in the US) is great reading for skeptics.

I offered up this reply to Tracy King’s retweet of Prof. Hood’s tweet:

@tkingdoll @profbrucehood I would not have met my lovely, fantastic, smart girlfriend @jlweiss if it were not for Twitter. #RiXmasQues—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) December 09, 2011

It’s absolutely true. We were introduced via a mutual Twitter friend (and former coworker for me) named Ryan Bridges.

I had no idea whether it would be picked, and not knowing precisely how Prof. Hood was going to use this, I sent another reply as well:

@profbrucehood @tkingdoll The infamous "David Mabus" would still be spamming if not for Twitter. #RiXmasQues Bkg: bit.ly/MabusDone—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) December 09, 2011

I completely missed when he followed up on December 18 with this hint that three had been picked:

Thanks for answering the #RiXmasQues Three were selected for broadcast on Dec 29th.—
bruce hood (@profbrucehood) December 18, 2011

Of course, even if I had seen this I still would have had no idea my compliment was among them. But it was, and in the third Christmas Lecture (which aired on BBC4 last Thursday, December 29) he read my compliment on the air. Here’s a screen shot.

Prof. Bruce M. Hood reading my tweet on BBC4 during the third Royal Instititution Christmas Lecture of 2011.

It’s hard to see in this small capture, but it is the second of the three tweets pictured on the projected screen above him.

Yes, he read my compliment to my girlfriend on national television, where it was seen by at least 1 million people. (A different nation than the one we live in, true, but still).

This exchange followed:

@krelnik BTW did you know that your tweet about your girlfriend was broadcast to over 1m Uk viewers tonight? I hope you are still with her—
bruce hood (@profbrucehood) December 29, 2011

I wasn't joking about retweeting on national television @krelnik sorry I hope she stlll loves you & sorry if not. oops.. @fail?—
bruce hood (@profbrucehood) December 29, 2011

@profbrucehood Nope, you're good. I still dig @krelnik.—
Jessica Weiss (@jlweiss) December 29, 2011

@jlweiss thats groovy. now 1m UK TV viewers know how much he loves you - no pressure there!

—
bruce hood (@profbrucehood) December 30, 2011

If you are in the UK you can watch it on BBC iPlayer here right now. Everyone else will be able to see it in January here at the Royal Institution’s site. The relevant part is about 50 minutes into the third lecture.

So don’t ever tell me, “Twitter is just people telling each other what they had for lunch.”

And thanks to Prof. Hood! Look for his new book The Self Illusion which comes out soon. If you use Amazon UK you can read a free extract from the book right now via this link.

Oh, and of course, thank you to my lovely, fantastic smart girlfriend Jessica, who still digs me.

This is the monthly roundup – links to all the content I’ve been involved with in the last month. It includes this blog as well as the stuff I post on other blogs, my podcasting activities, my best posts on Twitter as well as key shout-outs or mentions elsewhere.

Read on to see what you missed!

Blogging

Here were my blog posts this month. A good mix of stuff. Not quite the one-per-week posting rate I’ve been trying to achieve here at Skeptools, but I’ll get there eventually.

• November 2: Skeptools: Incentivizing online activism – a proposal
• November 2: JREF: Web of Trust is a Tool for Skeptic Outreach
• November 8: JREF: Skeptic History: UFO Investigations
• November 9: JREF: FishBarrel Now Supports US FDA Complaints (Crossposted here at Skeptools as well).
• November 15: JREF: Skeptic History: A Tale of Two Scientists
• November 17: JREF: Hypothes.is Reaches Funding Goal
• November 22: JREF: Skeptic History: Archeological Fakes
• November 29: JREF: Skeptic History: A Big Birthday

Mentions and follow-ups on other blogs:

• November 3: Hooray Reality: Fast Fast Slow: A Naturopathic Twitter Tale (A nice lesson in the speed of social media based on a conversation I participated in. Plugs What’s the Harm to boot).
• November 18: Evil Genius Chronicles: There Are Too Many Skeptic Podcasts (Dave Slusher vehemently disagrees with the premise of my Skepticamp presentation)

Podcasting

I contributed Skeptic History segments to these episodes of Skepticality:

• November 8: #169: Sports Season
• November 15: #170: The Tipping Point: MonsterTalk vs. Skeptiko
• November 29: #171: Astronomy by the Kilometer

Some shout-outs and mentions on other podcasts:

• November 16: Meet the Skeptics: Meet Dezrah Blinn (Dezrah the Strange) (Dezrah compliments the same presentation Dave Slusher criticized. Last 7 minutes of the podcast.)
• November 24: Token Skeptic: #89: On Great Superhero Skeptics – Panel From Dragon*Con 2011 (If you missed this panel I was on back in September, here’s your chance).
• November 26: Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe: Episode #332 (Nice shout-out to What’s the Harm at about 44 minutes, right after Who’s that Noisy)

Social Media

I posted on Twitter:

• 176 regular tweets, including:
• 22 ”What’s the harm in…?” stories
• 30 Skeptic History facts
• 113 replies to other Twitter posts

Here are highlights, the tweets that were retweeted the most. It starts, as it often does, with a compelling What’s the Harm:

What's the harm in a chiropractic neck adjustment? Spinal cord injury. 1.usa.gov/u5z0N4 /via @EdzardErnst—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 01, 2011

(~10 retweets)

Some activism against anti-vaccine propaganda:

Shame on #ATL based @Delta Airlines for running dangerous anti-vaccine propaganda! cc: @DeltaAssist bit.ly/uuvfcR—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 03, 2011

#ATL tell @Delta Airlines and @IMAvids to stop misinforming passengers about the flu. Sign this: chn.ge/s0BSWM #vaxfax—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 03, 2011

(~18 and ~10 retweets)

A heartbreaking vaccine story:

What's the harm in skipping a measles shot? Natalie died, Angelina is dying. bit.ly/tawtAf /by @justthevax—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 08, 2011

(~29 retweets)

Everyone loves Carl:

Skeptic History: Science popularizer & skeptic Carl Sagan was born Nov. 9, 1934. (d. 1996) carlsaganday.org—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 09, 2011

(~15 retweets)

A What’s the Harm from up north in Canada:

What's the harm in holistic healing? Arsenic poisoning, paralysis, $340K settlement. bit.ly/tzrqed /via Nicolas Basque—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 11, 2011

(~13 retweets)

The demise of PowerBalance was big news:

BREAKING NEWS: Bogus bracelet business @PowerBalance filed for bankruptcy on Friday! Owes $57M. t.co/TA2gz50w—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 21, 2011

(~30 retweets)

A What’s the Harm in Austin:

What's the harm in alternative medicine? Anaphylactic shock in Austin, doctor disciplined. bit.ly/tk5dbv /via @Blue_Wode—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 23, 2011

(~10 retweets)

A cancer quack named Burzynski was big skeptic news near the end of November:

Quackery & threats, a horrible business model. #Burzynski Clinic threatens 17 yr old blogger. bit.ly/vOGOy6 $BZYR—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 28, 2011

(~10 retweets)

So I proposed a little crowdsourcing:

Do you believe #Burzynski is not to be trusted? Help warn others via Web of Trust. Log in and vote here: bit.ly/u5STXp—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 28, 2011

(~13 retweets & a mention by Phil Plait)

And in 4 hours this was the result:

What’s the Harm got into Burzynski mode:

What's the harm in the #Burzynski Clinic? Wayne & Lisa wasted $20K, felt duped. bit.ly/sepVAV—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 29, 2011

(~11 retweets)

To get these as I post them, you should follow me on Twitter here.

Crowdsourcing Contributions

Here were my contributions to various projects this month:

I contributed 51 edits to Wikipedia.

I rated 16 sites on Web of Trust and left 2 comments.

I made 11 edits to the Skeptic History database. It now has 1379 items. (Plus I have a queue of several other items waiting to go in).

And on we go into December…

Initially Fishbarrel only supported agencies in the UK, and Simon has gradually added support for other countries. I’m pleased to relay the news that the Fishbarrel software can now be used by skeptics in the United States to file complaints with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA):

#FishBarrel now works with FDA in the US. US skeptics can now report false medical claims quickly. adventuresinnonsense.blogspot.com/2011/04/fishba…—
Simon Perry (@Simon_Perry) November 04, 2011

Read on for more details and some tips.

Go to Simon’s original blog post on Fishbarrel to download the updated software and view the tutorial video. If you previously downloaded it, you’ll need to update to the new version to get the US support. (It may happen automatically, or you can go to the Extensions page in Chrome and click the update button).

Once installed, a button will appear in your browser that looks like a rubber duck. Click it and pick Options to tell it you live in the USA and fill in other useful settings that you can learn more about in the tutorial.

Now, skeptics must keep in mind what FDA does and does not regulate in order to make these complaints effective. The agency regulates the labeling and advertising of prescription drugs and devices prescribed by a medical practitioner.  Other advertising claims and anything involving other product categories would be a matter for the FTC or perhaps even state agencies.  (Fishbarrel does not support those agencies yet).

Herbals and other vitamins and supplements covered under the DSHEA law of 1994 may be a prime target for this. Under the law vendors are allowed to make vague structure or function claims such as “supports a healthy metabolism” or “promotes wellness.”  However they are not allowed to make specific claims such as “cures asthma” or “eliminates cancer.” That goes beyond what DSHEA allows and skeptics should be seeking out these violations.  You can highlight the offending phrases with Fishbarrel and quickly make a report.

More tips on what to report and what not to report can be found with the FDA reporting form on their site. I encourage discussion of things to look out for and report in the comments below.

Update! Now comes word that FishBarrel can be used in Canada too:

Canadian skeptics can now report misleading health claims online with #Fishbarrel. adventuresinnonsense.blogspot.com/2011/04/fishba…—
Simon Perry (@Simon_Perry) November 09, 2011

Thank you to Simon Perry for Fishbarrel, and William London for tips on where to focus FDA complaints.

This post originally appeared (in a very slightly different form) at the James Randi Educational Foundation‘s SWIFT blog as Fishbarrel Now Supports US FDA Complaints and is cross-posted here.

For some time now I’ve been writing about things skeptics can do online to advance the cause of skeptical outreach. Of course blogging and podcasting are obvious avenues, but lately I’ve focused on crowd-sourced projects such as editing Wikipedia skeptically or rating sites in Web of Trust.

I think these projects could have a broader appeal (and perhaps a broader effect) in part because they lend themselves to small, incremental investments of time and effort. Blogs and podcasts generally require a substantial commitment of time, something not all skeptics are able or willing to do. But making skeptical edits to Wikipedia (for example) can be done in very small slices that can easily fit into an otherwise busy schedule. You can spend as much or as little time on it as you see fit, and it all still counts.

But therein lies a problem. For their huge investment of time, bloggers and podcasters get ample recognition for their work.  We all know their names, as they have thousands of readers or listeners.

But how do we provide some recognition or incentive for skeptics to devote little slices of their time to these crowdsourced projects? These tiny incremental efforts normally go unnoticed. Read on for my proposal.

Let’s Make Skepticism Fun

What I am proposing is to make it fun. I’m proposing the gamification of online skeptical outreach. It would be like a special Skeptics-only version of Foursquare.

The thing that makes this possible is that many of the relevant services have open APIs. These APIs allow the history on those services to be queried on behalf of skeptics who opt in to the game. Many also support OAuth, which would allow the opt-in process to be handled in a nice secure way. (I.e. you don’t have to hand over your password to let the game see your activity history on Foursquare).

It would work like this:

• Create an account on the skeptic game server
• Opt-in your accounts on the supported services you use
• Connect with your skeptic friends in the game
• The site measures & scores your skeptic activities
• The site notifies you when you reach certain milestones and how your score compares with others
• Compete with your friends for bragging rights!

The site would continuously scan your skepticism-relevant activities on the compatible sites that you chose to connect. It would give you “points” for each activity. You could also earn “badges” for certain key milestones.

Your points and badges will be totalled up and shown on a friends scoreboard as well as a global scoreboard. They could optionally be automatically broadcast elsewhere such as on your Twitter or Facebook, or if you do have a website a widget could be supplied to display them there.

It sounds silly and superficial, and it is. It’s designed to be a game, to turn tedious skeptical activism into play. The whole idea is to inject a little fun into what can often be a very unrewarding process.

What Would Be Included

Here are some of the online outreach activities I think could be automatically included if you opted them in:

• Edit Wikipedia articles relevant to skepticism
• Edit any article on Rational Wiki, Skepticamp Wiki or other community wiki
• RSVP for a skeptic event on Meetup or elsewhere
• Check in to a skeptic event on Foursquare
• Check in to a believer event on Foursquare
• Check in to a location relevant to skepticism on Foursquare
• Rate or comment on skeptic or believer sites on Web of Trust
• Report site violations online using Fishbarrel
• Answer questions & participate in Skeptics StackExchange

Almost all of these have API and OAuth support, the ones that don’t (i.e. Wikipedia) make the user history information we need public, so that data could simply be scraped.

A Hybrid Approach?

When I first floated this idea this afternoon on Twitter, Reed Esau suggested that a “hybrid approach” which would allow inclusion of other activities that aren’t entirely online. I think he may be right. These could include:

• Presenting at a Skepticamp
• Donating money to a skeptical organization
• Donating skeptical books to your local library
• Reporting sites to agencies like ASA, MHRA (not through fishbarrel)
• Successful rulings by ASA, MHRA, etc.
• Any of the other 105 suggestions in Daniel Loxton’s What Do I Do Next? guide

To keep the competitive game atmosphere and avoid accusations of cheating, we might need to draft some volunteers to supervise adding activities like this to the game and crediting them to the right players. But guess what – volunteering to manually do this could itself be a score-worthy activity in the game!

You’ll notice that I do not include things like blogging, podcasting, commenting on skeptic blogs and forums or bombing online polls. This is deliberate. I think history has shown that skeptics don’t need any encouragement to engage in those activities. So why incentivize them?

Badges

If you’re not familiar with Foursquare, you may have been confused earlier when I mentioned badges. Badges are used in Foursquare and other gamified sites to add an extra element of incentive, surprise and fun. Several Foursquare badges are pictured in the graphic at the top of this story.

Sometimes they are given as rewards for specific milestones that players can target, such as checking in to several different movie theaters. Sometimes they are given for things the player can’t entirely control themselves, such as the Super Swarm badge given for checking in with 250 other players.

Badges help make the game play less a sheer numbers game, and give it more serendipity. Skepticism is so rich with topics, I can imagine many different badge ideas. Maybe a “Behind Enemy Lines” badge could be given for checking in at an event like the infamous Mind, Body, Wallet festival in Australia. Or a “Team Randi” badge could be given for checking in to 5 JREF-sponsored events.

If you still aren’t getting the idea, take a look at this list of “Science Scout” badges suggested by Seelix. I particularly like the “I punch moon-landing deniers” badge, which we could adopt as-is.

Side Benefits

There might also be some interesting side benefits that would come out of implementing the game. In order to reward Foursquare checkins at skeptic or believer locations and events, we would have to identify those events. The result would be a database of locations worldwide that are relevant to skepticism.

In order to credit skeptical edits in Wikipedia, we’d have to identify which articles or categories are relevant to skepticism. The resulting list of articles could be used for other purposes, for instance researching the total skeptical page-view volume on Wikipedia.

There could be more, it would depend on the full scope of the system.

In Conclusion

The goal is to focus attention on those activities that inch us toward skeptical goals, but which currently go largely unrecognized in skeptical circles. By attaching numbers and goals to these activities, we could help recognize those tireless volunteers who may not be up on the stage at TAM speaking to 1,500 people but are still advancing the cause of skepticism.

I think this idea will draw considerable discussion, so please do comment below. But in the interest in opening up the discussion to folks who might not frequent this blog, I’ve also started a thread over at the James Randi Educational Foundation’s forum for further comment.

This is the monthly roundup – links to all the content I’ve been involved with in the last month. It includes this blog as well as the stuff I post on other blogs, my podcasting activities, my best posts on Twitter as well as key shout-outs or mentions elsewhere.

Click through to read more.

Blogging

Here were my blog posts this month. I’m starting to get a bit more productive and work on a schedule. Also, you can see I’ve started posting some short Skeptic History essays over at the JREF site in addition to the all other venues.

• October 7: JREF: UK Alt-Med Practitioners Are Feeling Pain
• October 11: JREF: Skeptic History: U.S. Medical Regulation
• October 13: Skeptools: Skeptic History everywhere you look
• October 13: JREF: Follow Up on NOFOLLOW (Crossposted here on Skeptools too)
• October 18: JREF: Skeptic History: The Randomness of Dates
• October 20: JREF: Skeptic Metrics: Measuring Our Impact Online
• October 21: Skeptools: Hypothes.is could become a crucial tool for skeptics
• October 25: JREF: Skeptic History: Vaccines
• October 29: JREF: Finding Skeptic News Online
• October 31: JREF: Skeptic History: Halloween Hoaxes

Mentions and follow-ups on other blogs:

• October 9: Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia: Conversations (Shout out)
• October 21: Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia: Anderson Cooper and John Edward ~ a new friendship (Responding to my Skeptic Metrics post above)
• October 29: One Astronomer’s Noise: Black holes, Homeopathy, and Robots… Stuff I’ve Missed

Podcasting

I contributed Skeptic History segments to these episodes of Skepticality:

• October 12: #167: The Happy Humanist
• October 25: #168: Centers for Zombie Control and Prevention

Some shout-outs and mentions on other podcasts:

• October 6: The Geologic Podcast #234
• October 10: Scopes Monkey Choir #48

If you haven’t listened to Scopes yet, I highly recommend it. It focuses on the intersection between skepticism and sound and music. I love skeptic specialization like that, it’s really the way to go.

Social Media

I posted on Twitter:

• 169 regular tweets, including:
• 19 “What’s the harm in…?” stories
• 31 Skeptic History facts
• 133 replies to other Twitter posts

Here are highlights, the tweets that were retweeted the most. October began with two different celebrity “What’s the Harm” stories in the same week. First Kevin Sorbo:

What's the harm in seeing a chiropractor? Actor Kevin Sorbo (@ksorbs) had 3 strokes. bit.ly/od4ZbP /via @BrianDunning—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) October 04, 2011

(~12 retweets)

Then Steve Jobs:

What's the harm in alternative medicine? Steve Jobs delayed surgery in 2004 on a naturopath's advice. bit.ly/qn12tW—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) October 06, 2011

(~27 retweets)

My JREF post about Nightingale Collaboration was popular:

Alt-med proponents in UK are really angry this week. @NightingaleC is the reason. The story here: bit.ly/no3per—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) October 08, 2011

(~20 retweets)

Later that week, Orac disagreed on the Steve Jobs story:

Orac has a more measured take on whether alt-med had anything to do with Steve Jobs' death. Good read: bit.ly/nepp89—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) October 08, 2011

(~19 retweets)

A skeptic history that tied in with recent news:

Skeptic History: 167 years prior to Harold Camping was a similar "Great Disappointment" on Oct. 22, 1844. bit.ly/dpqP7G—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) October 22, 2011

(~11 retweets)

Thank you to Ben Goldacre for sending this tweet that included a What’s the Harm link, it generated over 100 retweets and exposed hundreds of people to the site:

another homeopath death, see also bit.ly/9WP4xb RT @MovingToMontana: is.gd/k5ORZX—
ben goldacre (@bengoldacre) October 23, 2011

Some more What’s the Harms:

What's the harm in homeopathy? Young boy dead in Italy, parents investigated. tgr.ph/qGlPsN /via EosoftheEons #ten23—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) October 24, 2011

(~10 retweets)

What's the harm in skipping a vaccination? Largest U.S. outbreak of measles in years. usat.ly/okpv2U /via @GoddessGeek—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) October 25, 2011

(~15 retweets)

Skeptic History: Last natural case of smallpox found on Oct. 26, 1977. It was eradicated via vaccine. bit.ly/37tChg #vaxfax—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) October 26, 2011

(~10 retweets)

To get these as I post them, you should follow me on Twitter here.

Crowdsourcing Contributions

Here were my contributions to various projects this month:

I contributed 21 edits to Wikipedia.

I rated 4 sites on Web of Trust.

I made 11 edits to the Skeptic History database. It now has 1377 items.

Stay tuned for November.

I’ve always thought that the endpoint of this quest would be some sort of tool you could point at any piece of information and have it tell you whether it was true or false. It would be a computerized “skeptic-in-a-box” so to speak. I’ve done a bit of research on what it would take to build it. I’ve always thought that crowdsourcing and a reputation system to weight contributions by value would both figure prominently in any successful design.

Today I’m simultaneously very excited and just a little bit angry. Excited because I just got word that a project has been launched to build something very similar to my skeptic-in-a-box. (I’m angry only because it’s not my personal project.) But if this thing comes anywhere close to achieving its ambitious goals, I can definitely get over the angry part. It aims to go way beyond what I had in mind.

When Hypothes.is launches next year, it could be the most important piece of software ever created for applied skepticism. More details after the jump.

The Problem

I hardly need explain the problem space for skeptics. There is a huge amount of misinformation out there. People believe in pseudoscience, the paranormal and more. They make bad decisions based on these beliefs that have very bad consequences. The job of scientific skepticism is to point out the errors in the information underlying these belief systems, and help people learn to find their way away from them.

But the platforms (web sites, blogs) on which these ideas are espoused are often biased. If you go to a site devoted to homeopathy and try to explain how science says it is impossible, you often get shouted down, banned or worse. Just in the last week Peter Bowditch was banned once again from posting reasonable info about the science of vaccines to a mailing list set up by a notorious anti-vaccine lobbyist.

And so we skeptics spend much of our time posting on our own blogs and sites, where many of the people we need to reach never visit. One of the basic tenets of the presentation on which this blog is based is that posting on “neutral” sites, where both believers and skeptics congregate, is a better long-term strategy for skeptical outreach. In other words, don’t start a skeptic blog or post on that ghost-hunter site – go to YouTube or Facebook or Twitter and post there. You’re more likely to reach someone who needs you.

Hypothes.is might change that equation a bit.

Hypothes.is intends to peer-review the Internet

The Hypothes.is team is approaching it from a broader perspective, beyond that of scientific skepticism. They want to peer review any fact that appears anywhere on the web, on any site.

Here’s the slick introductory video, which does a good job of explaining it:

There are several key elements that should make this very attractive to skeptics. First is that it will operate without the cooperation or approval of the target sites. That should avoid the banning problem.

Second is that through browser plug-ins and other technology, the comments will appear in-context, right where the erroneous information is found. That will help outreach, insofar as the viewers built by hypothes.is are widely adopted.

Third, and most critical in my thinking, there will be an extensive reputation system to qualify and rank comments based on the expertise of the commenter. The lack of this was part of what doomed an earlier project called Dispute Finder. I thought for a while that it would evolve into the tool skeptics needed, but very quickly the data in that tool was awash in conspiracy theories and other nonsense, with no way provided to sort by quality.

Of course, the hypothes.is software hasn’t been built yet, so it remains to be seen if the hypothes.is team can avoid the same pitfalls. From the video above and the presentation below, they do seem to be well aware of the problems in maintaining content quality in a product like this.

Here’s a slide deck that presents it in more detail. It parallels some of what is in the video, but fleshes it out more:

Hypothes.is is launching as a non-profit. That may help insulate them from accusations of ulterior motives. (“Did my scathing critique get moderated down because the owner of that site is an investor in the company?”) But of course it poses its own problems of funding. They are running a Kickstarter project to get the initial funding to build it.

Aside from the money, they are going to need the support of a large number of domain experts who are willing to take the time to contribute to the system. That means you, skeptics. We need to get ready to spend time entering stuff into this. I hope that sometime next year after it is launched, I can do an updated version of my infamous “don’t start a blog” presentation that lists hypothes.is as the #1 thing skeptics should spend their time on while online.

Action Items

The software doesn’t exist yet. But there are things you can do to support it which I encourage:

• Register at hypothes.is to reserve your username & show your support.
• Follow @hypothes_is on Twitter and talk it up.
• If you can, consider donating to the Kickstarter project to fund it. They need to raise $100K by November 14th, they are over 1/3 of the way there as I write this.

Let’s all support this project and help it succeed. We need it, and the Internet needs it.

Thanks to Leo Lincourt for pointing out an article about this.

“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” Louis Brandeis (Other People’s Money: and How the Bankers Use It, 1914)

Linking directly to Internet misinformation and explaining why it is wrong is skepticism’s answer to Brandeis’ sunlight. But because Google and the other search engines use hyperlinks to determine the importance of web pages, many skeptics are fearful of linking to pseudoscience and paranormal sites. They fear that doing so will help (in some small way) boost the visibility of misinformation on the Internet.

They are right. Every time we link to the sites of our cultural competitors, we give them a tiny boost up in the search engines. It’s as if we’ve contributed ten cents to a fund for them to eventually buy a billboard. Those coins eventually add up.

I’ve seen some skeptics try to deal with this in various tricky ways. Some don’t link at all or include the URLs as unlinked plain text. (This inconveniences and annoys your readers). Some link through a link shortening service like TinyURL. (This does not work – Google still counts the link).

Some have even gone so far as to create a special online service to solve this problem. One which targeted British tabloid newspapers had the unusual name of IstyOsty. It looked and acted like a URL shortener but it was actually what technicians call a “proxy service”. That kept Google from following the link, but it also violated copyright laws. As a result, IstyOsty was forced out of existence back in August.

There is a simpler way to deal with this issue (which I wrote of three years ago) called NOFOLLOW. Read my original post for all the gory technical details, but essentially you add a special tag to each hyperlink to tell Google and other search engines to ignore that link for purposes of ranking content. A normal hyperlink looks like this when you create a web page:

<a href="http://bad.example.com">This is a link</a>

And a “nofollow” hyperlink looks like this:

<a href="//bad.example.com" rel="nofollow">This is a link</a>


It’s as simple as that. I recommend that skeptical bloggers and webmasters make sure to always nofollow links to sites which we are debunking. It should be our standard practice.

Feedback from Skeptics

Some time after my original post, a handful of skeptics expressed doubts about my recommendation. You can see some of their objections in a thread in the JREF Forum. I won’t reiterate all of the arguments here, but let me address a few of them.

For those who saw a fairness or reciprocity issue, I would point out that most of our cultural competitors do not even bother to link back to our sites. They act as if we don’t exist. So the argument that we shouldn’t do it to them because they don’t do it to us, is (more often than not) moot.

For those who argue that nofollow is intended as an anti-spam measure, and my suggestion is a misuse of it, I would point out that Google’s own documentation contradicts that. Quoting from their SEO Starter Guide, page 23:

Another use of nofollow is when you’re writing content and wish to reference a website, but don’t want to pass your reputation on to it. For example, imagine that you’re writing a blog post on the topic of comment spamming and you want to call out a site that recently comment spammed your blog. You want to warn others of the site, so you include the link to it in your content; however, you certainly don’t want to give the site some of your reputation from your link.

I think this clearly describes skeptical blogging.

Finally, for those who saw this as a way to cheat other website owners out of rightfully gained clicks or traffic: you’re wrong. A nofollow link is still a working hyperlink. If you click it, the other site gets a traffic hit like normal. It gets to display ads just like normal. They are not denied readers or the opportunity to make their case.  (Incidentally, this is exactly what got IstyOsty in legal trouble, as it was preventing visitors from getting to the original website by copying the content).

Criticism notwithstanding, I was pleased to see that many skeptics agreed with my recommendation back in 2008. In fact, some have adopted it as a standard practice and evangelized it to other skeptics as well.

Australian skeptic Joel Birch decided to take it one step further. Knowing that the extra tagging could sometimes be tedious, he built a tool to automate it called NoFollowr. This is a plug-in for the WordPress blog software that makes adding the necessary tag as simple as a single click. I recommend it if you run a site on WordPress.

Additional Justification

Since my original call to action, a further reason to use this technique has emerged. Although the quality of inbound links to your site are a primary driver in your Google rank, it is also true that outbound hyperlinks can affect your ranking. In other words, who you link to might affect how a search engine judges your site.

In a YouTube video entitled “Can my blogroll affect my blog’s reputation in Google?”, Google employee Matt Cutts warns not to link out to “spammy sites”.  A story is recounted of a blog that included dubious link in its blogroll, and subsequently had a severely lower rank in Google searches.

Now, I’m not saying that pseudoscientists are necessarily spammers, but do you trust them not to be? I don’t. I recently documented how some chiropractors deeply misunderstand how Google ranking works. If we’re not careful with our links, lack of knowledge on the part of those who we debunk could actually damage our efforts.

How are we doing?

A casual survey of top skeptic sites reveals that we still have a long way to go. Several major skeptical bloggers still do not make a habit of using nofollow. (You can check this yourself by choosing the “view source” or “view page source” option in your browser and looking for the nofollow tag). Especially if the site is highly prominent, these links are subtly undermining our efforts to improve the overally accuracy of science information on the internet.

I hope that by calling attention to this technique again here, I can make it standard practice for skeptical blogs. If you blog, make it your habit. And use the “view source” trick check to see that your favorite skeptical writers have made it their habit too.

This post originally appeared (in a very slightly different form) at the James Randi Educational Foundation‘s SWIFT blog as Follow Up on NOFOLLOW and is cross-posted here.

I’ve learned some things myself in this research. And in posting the results online I hope to help connect newer skeptics with the long history of scientific skepticism.

As of this week, there are now seven different places online you can look for a little dose of skeptic history. And soon there might be more!

Daily Dose

The original form of Skeptic History was as a daily dose – a single fact posted each day on social media. I’m approaching 1,000 days of doing this, as the first post was February 16, 2009. Here’s where you can get your daily Skeptic History:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• FriendFeed
• Google Buzz

Yes, I know, I know. Who the heck uses FriendFeed or Google Buzz anymore? I’m not sure. And frankly it appears FriendFeed is getting a bit creaky, as it hasn’t updated my posts from Twitter in over a week. Bugs notwithstanding, they are still there if you need them.

Several skeptics have asked me to post to Google Plus. I’d love to add it to the mix, but in order to guarantee a post every day at a particular time I really need a way to automate it. I can do that for the existing services, but not for Plus. Yet.

Update: The day after I first posted this, Google announced that Buzz will be shut off in a few weeks. I guess I better figure out the automation thing for Plus.

Bi-Weekly

Back in March, 2010 I decided a second venue for Skeptic History was a good idea. Many of the facts never make it into the daily post, simply because there are too many other good coincidentally on the same day. I thought that a longer form, where I could tell more of a story, would be a great addition to the daily facts.

Following my own advice not to start a new podcast, I volunteered my idea to Derek and Swoopy of Skepticality, and they eagerly accepted.

As of this week’s episode of Skepticality, I’ve done 44 Skeptic History podcast segments. They will continue.

Whenever you want

Back in June the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) released an iPhone app called Today in Skeptic History. The data in it comes from me. By installing this on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch you can get a bigger daily dose, and also look things up by date whenever you want. There are around 1,300 individual dates in the app, it is the entire database that I work from when I post daily.

NEW: Weekly

Now that I’m a Research Fellow for James Randi Educational Foundation, I’ve been blogging for their site more than I did before.

We figured a little Skeptic History would be a good addition to this, so starting this week I’ll be doing a weekly post there about it. The first one is about the history of U.S. medical regulation in October.

Those of you who are loyal Skepticality listeners might notice some familiarity to these. They are based on (but not identical to) the essays I’ve been doing on that podcast. The blog draws from the material that was on the podcast one year ago, so if you keep up with both JREF SWIFT and Skepticality, you won’t be hearing duplicate information. There’s plenty of Skeptic History to go around!

Coming Soon

Coming very soon there will be yet another place you can get a little dose of Skeptic History every so often. It might not even be in electronic form. That’s all I can say, I’ll let you know when it becomes available.

So if you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to during September, here’s your handy way to catch up.

Click through to read more.

Blogging

I only blogged twice on Skeptools this month, but I did post some stuff elsewhere:

• September 1: Skeptools: LIVE Video from Dragon*Con Skeptics track (Skeptrack)
• September 8: Atlanta Skeptics: Skepticamp videos now available on Vimeo
• September 16: Skeptools: Search engine optimization is another thing chiropractors get wrong
• September 23: JREF SWIFT: “Dave Mabus” Diagnosed and In Treatment

Podcasting

I contributed Skeptic History segments to two episodes of Skepticality this month:

• September 13: #165: Skeptrack – Dragon*Con 2011 Panel Discussion: Educating vs. Debunking
• September 27: #165: Ankylosaur of the Cosmos Interview(s): Daniel Loxton and Ann Druyan

I got several nice shout-outs from Susan Gerbic and Mark Edward on an episode of Rational Alchemy:

• September 13: Rational Alchemy 09/13/2011 Guerrilla Skepticism

In case you haven’t noticed by now, Susan has really taken up the gauntlet of skeptical editing of Wikipedia which Daniel Loxton and I threw down a few years ago.

Social Media

I posted on Twitter:

• 162 regular tweets, including:
• 15 “What’s the harm in…?” stories
• 31 Skeptic History facts
• 125 replies to other Twitter posts

Here are highlights, the tweets that were retweeted the most. Folks were excited about Skeptrack when it started:

#DragonCon #Skeptrack is streaming LIVE via @UStream, watch here: bit.ly/dc11st #skeptic—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) September 02, 2011

(The above and its clone the next day were retweeted about 23 times)

Good news about the vaccine clinic spread fast:

The #DragonCon clinic dispensed 225 vaccines, 100 flu shots and 125 TDaP, all for free. Thanks to @skepchicks & @womenthinking for doing it.—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) September 05, 2011

(Above was retweeted about 18 times)

A popular What’s The Harm item:

What's the harm in skipping a measles vaccination? 700 cases of measles in Quebec. bit.ly/o8Kyib /via @DoubtfulNews—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) September 23, 2011

(Above was retweeted about 10 times)

An interesting article:

The placebo effect is largely a mirage caused by poor study design. bit.ly/nKMFd9 /by @nbarrowman /via @vaughanbell—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) September 26, 2011

(Above was retweeted about 11 times)

Another What’s The Harm item:

What's the harm in alternative medicine? Reader's Digest runs down a list. bit.ly/qbCopm #skeptic—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) September 27, 2011

(Above was retweeted about 10 times)

And another:

What's the harm in a rule against blasphemy? Girl beaten, expelled for spelling error. bit.ly/q2g5Jl #blasphemyday—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) September 30, 2011

(Above was retweeted about 12 times)

To get these as I post them, you should follow me on Twitter here.

Crowdsourcing Contributions

Here were my contributions to various projects this month:

I contributed 16 edits to Wikipedia.

I rated 2 sites on Web of Trust.

I made 18 edits to the Skeptic History database. It now has 1,372 items.

I uploaded 1 video for Atlanta Skeptics (see blogging above).

That was a pretty good month, though I had hoped to blog a bit more often. More to come in October. I went through my ideas for blog posts the other day, and I’ve got plenty of good stuff to post.

Yesterday I became aware of an article on this topic written by a chiropractor. I was alerted to this by the editor of the excellent EBM First website, who goes by the moniker Blue Wode. He characterized it as an attempt at a “dirty trick” but it immediately struck me as a misguided waste of time.

With a little applied skepticism, you’ll see why I thought this. Read on.

The article in question is “Put Good Chiropractic on Top” over on Dynamic Chiropractic, a news site targeted at chiropractors and supporters of chiropractic. Written by publisher Donald M. Petersen Jr. the article correctly points out that many members of the general public gets answers to questions like “What is chiropractic?” from the crucial first page of Google results.

Amazingly, even though he criticizes the contents of Wikipedia’s article on chiropractic (which ranks #1), he never suggests that chiropractors try to fix that. That’s his first mistake of several in this article. As I and other skeptics have repeatedly pointed out, editing Wikipedia for skeptical content is absolutely crucial to outreach. But that’s not our focus here today.

Back to the article, the author then laments that the Skeptic’s Dictionary page on chiropractic ranks as highly as it does, since it is “anti-chiropractic information”. His focus on this result is his second mistake. The page in question is the seventh or eighth (depending on various factors) organic result in Google, or even lower if you include local results and images in your count. Studies shows that only a tiny percentage of users ever get that far down in search engine results.

The Erroneous Suggestion

But his biggest error is his suggestion for his readers. What he proposes they do is to click the Google +1 button next to pro-chiropractic sites in search results.

In the screen shot below, you can see what he’s talking about. If you are signed in to Google, each result will have a +1 button immediately to its right. The button will light up if you hover over it, and a tooltip appears that says Recommend this page as seen here:

If you click that button, you give Google a signal that you recommend that site to others.

The chiropractor claims clicking those plus buttons will “increase the exposure of important chiropractic information and hopefully move the good chiropractic Web sites ahead of the bad ones”.

I’m skeptical of that.

Applying Skepticism

I must admit I’m not the first to apply skeptical methods to the topic of SEO. Others have pointed out that much of the advice proffered by so called SEO professionals is pure quackery. Some have even applied statistical techniques to show how nonsensical it is.

To see why I might be skeptical of this particular technique, we won’t need statistics. Let’s start right in Google’s own help files. The following quote is from a page that the chiropractor’s own article links (in a footnote):

How does +1 affect search results?

+1 helps people discover relevant content—a website, a Google search result, or an ad—from the people they already know and trust. The +1 button appears on Google search, on websites, and on ads. For example, you might see a +1 button for a Google search result, Google ad, or next to an article you’re reading on your favorite news site.

Adding the +1 button to pages on your own site lets users recommend your content, knowing that their friends and contacts will see their recommendation when it’s most relevant—in the context of Google search results.

Note the emphasis, which I’ve added.

The adjustment of search engine results by the “+1″ buttons only affects the results seen by your online friends and contacts. It does not affect the results for anyone else. That is what Google’s own help says, plain as day.

Of course, you can see how someone might get the false impression that this was actually working. Once you press the “+1″ button, your results are going to change (for you). You immediately see anecdotal evidence of success. If you wanted to check the results, you might ask a close friend or coworker to check it from their computer. But because they are your friend, their results will change too! More anecdotal evidence. You are being led astray by one of the very same things that leads believers in alt-med astray in the first place – mistaking anecdotes for data.

Another piece of evidence of this is right in that screen shot above. Look at the very last result. It is my What’s the harm in chiropractic page. But look right below it – it says “You shared this” and shows my avatar. The only reason that result appears there is because I made that screen shot myself. You’ll note that the chiropractor didn’t mention my site in his article – he doesn’t see it in his results. Unless your friends with me on Twitter or Google Plus, you won’t see it on the first page either.

As a rule of thumb, whenever checking changes to Google search results you should log out of Google. That will prevent them from using your friends list to adjust your results, and you’ll see something closer to what an average user might see.

A Thought Experiment

If you are still skeptical of my analysis, let’s conduct a thought experiment. Consider this feature from Google’s perspective for a bit. You don’t have to dig very deep into the history of Google to find many stories about various attempts (including some silly ones) to manipulate Google search results. There have even been some skepticism specific efforts to alter Google search results, including one to help a friend that I promoted right here at skeptools.

Google has repeatedly altered its algorithms in order to undo the damage caused by these attempts. Because so much commerce is done on the web, there are considerable financial incentives in this battle, and it is ongoing. There are hundreds of such methods involved. They are generally referred to as black hat SEO or spamdexing.

Because Google makes much of its income through advertising, they are also fight a constant battle with what is called click fraud: bogus attempts to generate fake clicks on online ads. Hackers have even installed malware on millions of computers in such attempts. This is big business.

Well guess what, just like online ads, those “+1″ buttons would be a very attractive target for click-fraud. Google is many things, but they are not dumb. They are not going to launch a feature that opens up their search results to widespread click fraud. Avoiding this is part of the reason that the buttons are designed to only affect your friends and contacts.

Anyone claiming anything else right now, is trying to sell you snake oil. (And yes, there are folks trying to sell this particular brand of snake oil already).

Now, nothing is forever. It is certainly possible that the +1 button will start to affect search engine rankings in the future. (As we saw, Google constantly changes its algorithm). And, indeed, Google gave some indication just last month that they are looking into doing this. But read that article carefully, it points out the very same caveats I’m pointing out here, and others too. Google has to tread very, very carefully here to avoid opening themselves up to deliberate manipulation.

So what SEO techniques actually work?

I agree with the remark that Ted Dziuba makes in the SEO quackery article I linked earlier:

There are a handful of fundamentals about page design and other nitty things like URL structure that are generally accepted as good SEO, and you can derive all of this from the principles of not completely failing at web design. Non-brain-damaged web design and link building are 100% of SEO.

Anyone who tells you different is a quack that is only trying to separate you from your money.

I totally agree. Most of the techniques are very simple, and none of them are big secrets. You can find them all in Google’s own webmaster guide to SEO. Download the Adobe PDF document linked on the right.

Yup, Google tells you how to do it right. And why not? Good, relevant search results help you promote your site, but they also help Google stay popular as a search engine.

Incidentally, in Google’s guide you will find the following advice on page 9:

Use words in URLs

URLs with words that are relevant to your site’s content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site. Visitors remember them better and might be more willing to link to them.

Avoid:

• using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs
• choosing generic page names like “page1.html”
• using excessive keywords like”baseball-cards-baseball-cards-baseballcards.htm”

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the URL of the article that set this all off:

http://www.dynamicchiropractic.com/mpacms/dc/article.php?id=55558

And let’s compare it with the URL of the Skeptic’s Dictionary article:

http://www.skepdic.com/chiro.html

Those chiropractors not even following the basics of good SEO on their own site! That has more to do with their poor placement in Google than any black hat trickery.

Any fancy SEO techniques they are promoting are just as much snake oil as their chiropractic claptrap.

If you like this article, feel free to press the “+1″ or other like buttons below with no fear of reprisal. You should also follow me on Twitter here.

I’ve decided to do a monthly wrap-up post with links to the main things I’ve posted or created online in the previous month. If for some reason you haven’t gotten your fill of my nonsense lately, it’s a handy way to catch up with what I have been up to in the last 30 days or so.

Blogging

Three posts this month, a little less than normal, but one of them is now by far the most red article on this blog:

• August 9: Skeptools: An inexpensive skeptical tool everyone should have
• August 17: Skeptools: Case Study: How a notorious spammer was brought down via Twitter
  Within hours became the most popular post on this blog, and within a few days it represented 50% of all the page views on this blog, ever.
• August 28: Skeptools: Digital Guide to Dragon*Con 2011

Podcasting

I contributed Skeptic History segments to three episodes of Skepticality this month:

• August 2: #162: Bill Nye, The Planetary Guy
• August 16: #163: Extreme Fear
• August 30: #164: Can YOU see the Gorilla?

I was interviewed on this podcast:

• August 30: Search Engine with Jesse Brown #101: The Story of Mabus

News Coverage

It is rare that I get news coverage but the Mabus story got my name in the paper a few times this month:

• August 11: Menaces de mort sur internet: «Mourez, athées, mourez» (La Presse) (English translation here)
• August 11: Montreal cops probe Internet death threats (Toronto Sun)
• August 12: Montreal police start probe of Twitter threats (Montreal Gazette)
• August 12: Montreal police finally investigating online threats (Vancouver Sun)
• August 12: Montreal police spammed into submission (Montreal Gazette)
• August 12: Montreal police goaded into investigating cyber-crank (Montreal Gazette) Modified version of previous article.
• August 17: Have we seen the last tweet from “David Mabus”? (Bad Astronomy)
• August 18: Prolific Web Troll Arrested, With Help From Atheists on Twitter (New York Times, The Lede Blog)
• August 18: EXCLU! Menaces de mort sur Internet: d’autres victimes + réactions du principal plaignant (Branchez-Vous.com) (English translation here)
• August 19: La comparution de Markuze reportée (TVA Nouvelles) (English translation here) Doesn’t mention me, but is one of few articles about the final hearing.
• August 22: The RCMP and Montreal police ignored cybercrime while demanding new powers to fight cybercrime (Macleans)

There were many, many other blog posts which mentioned the Mabus affair and linked to my post. Thanks to everyone for the link love. You can see pingbacks for most of them on the Mabus post itself in the comments.

Social Media

I posted on Twitter:

• 135 regular tweets, including:
• 16 “What’s the harm in…?” stories
• 31 Skeptic History facts
• 191 replies to other Twitter posts

Here are highlights, the tweets that were retweeted the most. (Not surprisingly, many revolve around Mabus)

Skeptic History: Happy birthday to skeptic James Randi, born August 7, 1928. http://bit.ly/ngIOuo #TAM9 @jref—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) August 07, 2011

Above got approximately 32 retweets.

Thank you, @MtlGazette for keeping the pressure on @SPVM to do something: http://bit.ly/pBsSTO #mabus—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) August 11, 2011

Above got approximately 26 retweets.

Wow. Scientists at MIT develop technology that could be used against ANY viral infection. http://bit.ly/oyEoXj—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) August 11, 2011

Above got approximately 17 retweets.

Wondering how #Mabus finally arrested? Skeptical activism on Twitter! I provide background & details: bit.ly/MabusDone—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) August 17, 2011

Above got approximately 42 retweets.

BREAKING: #Mabus appears in court, now charged with 16 counts. Given 30 day psych eval. Court again Sept. 19. bit.ly/oLCr2o—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) August 19, 2011

Above got approximately 27 retweets.

To get these posts on a more timely basis, you should follow me on Twitter here. You can also see them on Facebook if you prefer, just friend me there.

Crowdsourcing Contributions

I wasn’t able to contribute much to crowdsourcing projects in August, a consequence of Dragon*Con preparation and the Mabus affair taking up much of my time.

I only made 14 edits on Wikipedia, mostly to my user pages.

I rated 3 sites on Web of Trust.

I edited the Skeptic History database 13 times, those edits will be visible in the JREF Today in Skeptic History iPhone App sometime soon.

I uploaded 4 Atlanta Skeptics videos to Vimeo (Skeptical Trivia Contest, Allergies: Why Your Body Is Trying To Kill You, Internet Reviews and My Year of Critical Mothering) and updated the Skepticamp Wiki to link to them.

And that’s it for August. I’ve got some good things planned for September so keep your eyes on this blog.

Thank you to Mark Ditsler of Abrupt Media for the huge amount of work he does to make this happen. You can also view it and text chat with other viewers over on the UStream.tv site here.

Consult the Skeptrack schedule for the planned events. You’ll be able to see me on the following two panels:

Great Superhero Skeptics! The History
Sunday 8:30pm EDT (aka 5:30pm PDT or Monday 00:30 GMT)
Many of us know some names, but who have you missed and who should we know? A roundtable discussion on great authors, thinkers, past and present.
Moderator: Desiree Schell
Panelists: Phil Plait, Benjamin Radford, Eugenie C Scott, Kylie Sturgess and me.

How to be a REAL LIFE superhero
Monday 2:30pm EDT (aka 11:30am PDT or 18:30 GMT)
Things you can do to help save thousands of lives.
Moderator: Maria Walters
Panelists: Derek Bartholomaus, A Kovacs, Rebecca Watson, Elyse Anders, Amy Davis Roth and me.

If you are not in US Eastern time note that Atlanta is at GMT-4. Click through to the full post for the broadcast start and end times translated for you into GMT and PDT, a list of programming that will not be on the feed, and a couple other tips.

The schedule as printed in the program book and on the Skeptrack site is in U.S. Eastern time, the local time in Atlanta. Translated to a few time zones, here are the times when you should be able to see live programming in the video widget above:

Greenwich Mean Time

• 14:00 GMT on Friday Sept. 2 to 03:00 GMT Sept. 3
• 12:30 GMT on Saturday Sept. 3 to 01:30 GMT Sept. 4
• 12:30 GMT on Sunday Sept. 4 to 03:00 GMT Sept. 5
• 14:00 GMT on Monday Sept. 5 to 21:00 GMT

U.S. Eastern Time

• Friday, Sept. 2: 10:00am to 11:00pm EDT
• Saturday, Sept. 3: 8:30am to 9:30pm EDT
• Sunday, Sept. 4: 8:30am to 11:00pm EDT
• Monday, Sept. 5: 10:00am to 5:00pm EDT

U.S. Pacific Time

• Friday, Sept. 2: 7:00am to 8:00pm PDT
• Saturday, Sept. 3: 5:30am to 6:30pm PDT
• Sunday, Sept. 4: 5:30am to 8:00pm PDT
• Monday, Sept. 5: 7:00am to 2:00pm PDT

Of course, this is being done on the fly with no budget from a remote location, so technical difficulties are to be expected. (In other words, don’t be surprised if the picture or sound or both drop out occasionally. Please be patient).

Please note that a few items on the Skeptrack schedule take place in a larger room, away from the TV cameras, so these will not appear on the video feed. At post time these include:

• Thursday 7:00pm EDT – Ben Radford – Investigation Workshop 1
• Friday 8:30pm EDT – Various – Celebrity Quiz-o-Tron 2000
• Saturday 1:00pm EDT – Ben Radford – Investigation Workshop 2
• Saturday 10:00pm EDT – George Hrab – Geologic Podcast LIVE!
• Sunday 2:30pm EDT – Various – Wait, Wait, Don’t Fool Me!

The feed will go dark during these times.

If you have any trouble viewing this here, try it over on UStream.tv as well, it might work better there. There’s also a text chat room over there where you can keep in touch with other viewers.

If you are an experienced user of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) you may want to connect to it directly using an IRC client. You can do so with this information:

• Server: chat1.ustream.tv
• Port: 6667
• Channel: #skeptrack
• Login: Use the username & password you set up at Ustream.tv

See my previous blog post for additional tips and tricks on staying connected at Dragon*Con and tracking what is going on there.

As always, you can follow me on Twitter here.

The purpose of this blog post is to be a clearinghouse for all things digital related to the meeting. The particular focus is on Skeptrack, but there are a bunch of resources and tips here that will be useful to any digitally connected attendee.

Just some of the info in this post that can save you time or money or both:

• Do you need internet access but are not bringing a laptop? I’ll tell you which hotel supplies computers you can use for free.
• Are you staying at the Marriott Marquis? I’ll tell you how to save at least $5 per day on WiFi charges.
• On a tight budget and desperately need some free WiFi near the con? I’ll tell you several places to go.
• Would you like to put the pocket program on your Kindle, Blackberry or other portable, but don’t know how? I’ll show you a site that can do it for you.
• Want to rent a 4G modem during the show? I’ll tell you how.

All that and much more, after the jump…

There’s quite alot of information here, so for quick reference, here’s a table of contents you can use to jump forward as needed:

• Online Sources of Info
• Smartphone App
• Calendars Online
• Skeptrack streaming video
• Other streaming video
• Twitter
• Foursquare
• Free WiFi
• Hilton & Marriott WiFi
• Hyatt, Sheraton & Westin WiFi
• Tethering
• 4G in Atlanta
• Power
• Printing & Shipping Added

Online Sources of Conference Info

There are a wide variety of sources of information about the show online, both official and unofficial. The Dragon*Con website most up-to-date official information. There is also a web site for the convention newsletter, the Daily Dragon. Almost any question you have about the convention can be answered on those sites. In particular, you may want to bookmark this page at the Daily Dragon for a complete list of programming changes.

A bit of trivia: I was the original creator and editor of the Daily Dragon back in 1990. I ran it and a couple related departments (such as the information desks, and creating the pocket program design that is still in use) until 1997.

Dragon*Con Smartphone App

If you have a smartphone of some kind, the best way to have all the information relating to the event at your fingertips is the app. Follow Me, the same app that was customized for Skeptrack last year as well as several TAMs, has been customized for iPhone as well as for Android.

The application has the complete guest list as well as a complete schedule of events. You can browse these a few different ways. Tap “Speakers/Performer” to browse an alphabetical list of people. Tap a name to see that person’s speaking schedule. Or you can tap “Events” to access the entire schedule (tap “All Events”) or by track (tap the track name). Keep tapping to see more details.

Once you are looking at an event listing (however you got there) you can bookmark it simply by tapping the star in the upper right corner. All your bookmarked events will appear under “My Schedule” from the main screen. That’s a good way to plan your weekend, then refer to it as you go about your day to see what is up next.

The app has all sorts of other info as well. You can view maps of the hotels. You can view documents containing useful info such as shuttle bus schedules. You can also get alerts from the convention organizers and get a quick look at the current conversations on Twitter about the show. The Daily Dragon editor posted a mini-tutorial for the app, check it for more tips.

If your phone is not an iPhone or Android, do not despair. There is also a mobile web version of the application you can access from any browser such as a Blackberry or even a PC or Mac. It has much the same features, but you will need to log in to use the personalization features such as creating your own schedule. And, of course, you’ll need access to the internet whenever you plan to use it.

Here’s a tip. The link for mobile web version also redirects to the iPhone or Android version as appropriate. So that one hyperlink is all you need. You can also use the QR code at right to access that URL.

Another tip. The app updates itself at least daily to insure you have the best info. But naturally these updates require a working Internet connection. Keep in mind that Dragon*Con is held in multiple large hotels with varying levels of Internet availability. If you suspect your phone or tablet’s net access might not work well in all locations, be sure to update the app just before you leave home, or while in the airport. Just click the “Sync” icon to force an update. See below for locations near the con where free WiFi is available.

While I’m on the subject of Android users, a game called League of Spies will be available at the convention and you can help play-test it.

Online Calendars

Part of the reason for the smartphone app is the programming schedule for Dragon*Con is huge. It takes a 128-page booklet to describe it all. If you don’t have a smartphone, or would prefer to see the full book anyway, you don’t have to wait until you arrive to read those 128 pages. The book is available online now in a number of different formats.

You can download the full 128-page booklet or alternately just the schedule grids from the center pull-out as PDF files. On some systems you may need to install the Adobe Acrobat software to view them if you don’t have it already.

If you would rather read the program online (or you don’t care to install Acrobat Reader) you can read both documents in web page form via Google Docs. Here are links for the full pocket program and the pull-out schedule grids via Google Docs. You can view or search them there, or save copies to your own Google Docs workspace.

If you’d like another option for online reading, the two documents have also been uploaded to Scribd. Both the full pocket program and the pull-out schedule grids are viewable directly online there.

Another use for Scribd: if you hit the button marked “mobile” on the right side, the site can convert the file to a format appropriate for many mobile devices and send it directly to your device. This includes such devices as Kindle, Nook, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm and many more.

There is also an unofficial version of the track programming grids being maintained in a wiki that has many other tips and advice about Dragon*Con. (I’m not sure how up-to-date this is being kept now that the official schedule has been published).

Streaming Video

Skeptrack will be trying to stream all of the programming from their room live this year, as they did last year. You can watch it at the Ustream.tv web site. I’ll also put up an embed on the top of this blog on the first day of the show.

Note: when a small programming track like Skeptrack has a major guest on their schedule, the convention moves that event to a larger room, for obvious logistical reasons. For also obvious reasons, it is impossible to move the entire video rig to the other room for one hour. Thus, the Skeptrack video will go dark during these events.

You can see which events these are on the Skeptrack schedule, they’re the ones not listed as Hilton 205/206/207. As I write this, these events include:

• Thursday 7:00 pm – Ben Radford – Investigation Workshop 1
• Saturday 1:00 pm – Ben Radford – Investigation Workshop 2
• Saturday 10:00 pm – George Hrab – Geologic Podcast LIVE!
• Sunday 2:30 pm – Various – Wait, Wait, Don’t Fool Me!

All schedules are subject to change, of course.

UStream Chat
The streaming video has a chatroom associated with it. If you are viewing the video on UStream or on the Skeptrack site, you will see it right there. If you are an experienced user of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) you may want to connect to it directly using an IRC client. You can do so with this information:

• Server: chat1.ustream.tv
• Port: 6667
• Channel: #skeptrack
• Login: Use the username & password you set up at Ustream.tv

Other Streaming Video

The main events at Dragon*Con are not live-streamed, but a handful of other events at Dragon*Con will be live streamed, depending on what track they are in and who is involved. So far this year these include:

• Whedon Universe – Joss Whedon’s shows

If you know of other live streams, let me know and I’ll update this section.

Live Updates via Social Media

As the conference gets underway, the attendees will be talking about it online. This can give you a real-time glimpse into what is going on, even if you are not attending. Skeptics (like anyone else) use a variety of social media sites such as Facebook, Myspace, Tumblr and so on. But I am going to focus on Twitter here.

The reason for this focus is twofold. First, there seems to be a critical mass of skeptics and other Dragon*Con attendees that use Twitter regularly. Almost all of the participants in Skeptrack have Twitter accounts, and about half of the guests of Dragon*Con as a whole are active there.

The second reason is posts on Twitter are, by default, public to all. Unlike services like Facebook where you usually have to previously become “friends” with someone to see what they are writing about, on Twitter anyone can see anyone’s posts. This allows aggregation techniques to be used to see a unified stream of activity quite easily. In other words, simply by executing an appropriate Twitter search and hitting refresh periodically, you can get a robust feed of events without even having a Twitter account yourself. Read on for tips.

If you do have a Twitter account, there a few key accounts you should follow for important updates. The accounts @DragonCon and @Daily_Dragon are both official and post announcements from the organizers of the convention. The account @Skeptrack is operated by Derek Colanduno for announcements about the skeptic track.

Twitter Lists

I could go on listing other accounts you should follow, but this blog post would become very tedious. Fortunately Twitter has a feature where you can create lists of accounts for others to use. I have created a public Twitter list of Skeptrack participants. Follow that for all the scoop on Skeptrack.

Depending on how you use Twitter, you can either subscribe directly to that list, or use them as a way to find key Twitter users to follow yourself (by clicking “Following” in upper right). In any case, they are gold mine of people who will be talking about the show.

Even If You Don’t Use Twitter

Whether or not you are a Twitter user, you can still take advantage of all the content simply as a reader. One way to do this is just to navigate to the lists mentioned above and refresh every so often.

You can also cast a wider net Twitter’s public search function. Many folks will be tagging their posts with a hashtag such as #dragoncon, so you can see all the discussion by searching carefully. I recommend this search which picks up all posts tagged as well as the @DragonCon and @Daily_Dragon accounts. Simply keep that page open and pick refresh every so often. This is a great way to keep up with what is going on at the con.

Location Services

Another aspect of social media that has become prominent just recently are what are now called location based services. These are services that make publishing your current location a key part of the experience of communicating with your friends. These include Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt and others.

These services could be very useful, especially after hours at TAM. Dragon*Con is spread across five main (and several other) hotels in downtown Atlanta. It can take quite a while to rendezvous with someone at a common location. By using a location based service to see where your friends are, you could save lots of time and find out where the action is.

Based on my experiences living in Atlanta, Foursquare has far more subscribers and venues already set up here. It also seems to have better support for more types of phones than some of the other services.

There are several venues for the hotels as well as for the fan tracks themselves, rather than maintain a big list of links here I’ve created a list on Foursquare containing the venues for Dragon*Con. Feel free to suggest ones I have missed.

If you are new to Foursquare, be sure to play! You might get some hard-to-get badges out of it. Last year at Dragon*Con 2010 one of the first Super Swarms that ever happened in Atlanta was during Dragon*Con.

Wireless Connectivity On-Site

Now none of this social media stuff is going to be useful without wireless connectivity. Atlanta is a major American city so of course it has coverage under all of the nationwide cellular services including AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon. It also has 4G coverage, both WiMax and LTE (details below). So you have a number of options to stay connected. Let’s start with the free stuff.

Free WiFi

There are a few locations you can get free WiFi, if you are willing to venture outside the comforts of the five host hotels. Keep in mind the host hotels are business hotels (not resorts) and they stay in business by selling services to convention goers. So the wireless internet is definitely not free for all inside the hotels (with a few exceptions).

I did some exploring and found eight easily accessible locations near the convention where you can get free WiFi. These are perfect for a daily photo upload or blog post, but will definitely not keep you connected 24/7. Please keep in mind these are all associated with businesses, and they would appreciate your support. At least buy a Coke or a coffee or something before using their bandwidth. Also keep in mind most of these businesses are not open 24 hours. I’ve included their phone numbers so you can check.

I’ve put all the info including the hours I could determine into a custom Google Map you can see at left above. Click it for a fully interactive map with phone numbers, access point names and operating hours for each business. If for some reason you can’t access the map, here’s the basic rundown:

• Caribou Coffee in SunTrust Plaza, 303 Peachtree (“Caribou”) (404) 681-0208
• Caribou Coffee in Peachtree Center, 231 Peachtree (“Caribou”) (404) 688-3355
• Corner Bakery Cafe at 270 Peachtree St. (“CornerBakeryWiFi”) (404) 215-9000
• Fire of Brazil / Jalapeno Charlies at 218 Peachtree (“Fire of Brazil &Jalapeno Charlie”) (404) 525-5255
• Hooters at 209 Peachtree St. (“Hooters”) (404) 522-9464
• Marriott offers one day of free WiFi, see below.
• Peachtree Center Food Court, 303 Peachtree (“PeachtreeCenter”)
• Rays in the City at 240 Peachtree St. (“Rays Guest Wireless”) (404) 524-9224
• Sheraton offers two hours of free WiFi in lobby, see below.
• Starbucks at 240 Peachtree St. NOT the ones in the hotels! (“attwifi”) (404) 589-4522

Note that almost all of these require you to log in using a web browser (and accept the terms of service) before using the wireless. Keep that in mind if you are there to check your email or Twitter – you’ll have to open a browser first to get connected.

WiFi is a bit more complicated at the hotels. Because Dragon*Con is spread across five official hotels, and each is run by a different company, the WiFi details vary. I’ve got the details below, they are accurate as of August 26th.

Be warned: the hotel WiFi systems, particularly the ones with partially free options (Marriott, Sheraton) are bound to be overloaded during the convention. Don’t expect them to be super fast at all times. I definitely would not plan on streaming video from your fan table 24/7 unless you’ve made special arrangements.

Atlanta Hilton WiFi (Skeptrack location)

The Hilton runs its own WiFi and has coverage throughout the building. The SSID is “hhonors” like most Hilton properties. Prices are:

• One hour – $5.95
• One day (512kb up/1024kb down) – $12.95
• One day (1024kb up/2048kb down) – $15.95

You can bill it to your room (if you are staying at the Hilton) or use a credit card. My experience is that the Hilton WiFi works pretty well in the lobby and meeting areas, but others have said that it can be very poor in some of the meeting rooms.

Note there are also access points named “Hilton-Meeting” which are used for events that contract with the hotel for free WiFi. Dragon*Con is not one of those events, so don’t bother with those access points.

Atlanta Marriott Marquis WiFi

This hotel is directly across Courtland Street from the Hilton and is often the center of evening activities due to its large atrium lobby and many bars. Their wireless is provided by iBAHN. (SSID: ibahn). If you are Marriott Rewards Gold or Platinum Elite member, you get free wireless.

Also, and this is new since last year, you appear to get one day (24 hours) of free wireless in the Marriott when you first access it. After your first day is up, the public area rates are as follows, payable by credit card:

• 15 minutes – $3.95 + $0.25 each add’l minute
• One day – $9.95

Inside the guest rooms, wireless is $12.95 per day, which includes Ethernet access and unlimited phone calls. You can roam onto the WiFi in the public areas as well.

However, I recommend you not pay the above rates. Why? iBAHN also supports users roaming from the following third-party WiFi providers:

• AT&T
• Boingo
• BT MobileXpress
• BT Openzone
• iPass
• T-Mobile

Many of these providers have per-day or monthly subscription prices considerably lower than $12.95 or $9.95 per day. (For instance, I use Boingo sometimes at airports, and they offer a $7.95 per month subscription rate. T-Mobile has a $9.99 per month rate for those with phone contracts. There are other rates and plans including per-day rates that vary with location). You may already have an account with one of them. If not, set up an account on one of these other providers prior to arriving at the hotel. (AT&T, Boingo, BT OpenZone and T-Mobile seem well suited for home users, the others are very business oriented).

When you log in to the Marriott WiFi, click “Subscription Service” or “Roaming Partner” on the iBAHN login screen and click next. You can select your provider and use your username and password from the other service to log in. You’ll definitely save money.

Note that like the Hilton, the Marriott has separate access points for meetings which provide free WiFi to participants, these are named “ibahn_conference”. Don’t bother with these, as Dragon*Con has not paid the Marriott to enable them.

Hyatt Regency Atlanta WiFi

The Hyatt provides it’s own wireless (SSID: hyatt) in the lobby and meeting areas. The T-Mobile hotspot coverage which was here last year is gone.

Hyatt’s pricing has been simplified since last year. It is $12.95 for 24 hours of use, per device. Hyatt explicitly disclaims their own WiFi coverage in their meeting rooms, which are mostly on the lower levels of the hotel, so be warned.

Boingo also claims to cover the Hyatt (SSID: swisscom) according to their website. However, when I was in the building last week, I didn’t pick up any hotspots under that name. Your mileage may vary.

Sheraton WiFi

This hotel has a partially free WiFi (SSID: “Link @ Sheraton”). It gives you access for 2 hours and covers the lobby areas. Keep in mind the caveat though – as a free option, it is bound to be overloaded a bit.

After the first 2 hours of free access, it is $11.95 for 24 hours per device.

Sheraton also has a nice open access computer area one floor above the lobby, with eight computers that guests can use. I would expect these to be overloaded with users during the convention, but might be useful in a pinch.

There is also a separate WiFi in the rooms, also $11.95 for 24 hours. These access points don’t seem to cover into the lobby or meeting room areas, so I wouldn’t plan on using them while outside your room.

Westin WiFi

The Westin has WiFi in the lobby and meeting room areas (SSID: “Westin Lobby”). They have tiers of service as follows:

• Standard (1 MBps down/1 MBps up) $14.95 per day
• Premium (2 MBps down/2 MBps up) $18.95 per day

They only accept credit cards when you log in.

Like the Marriott and Hilton, the Westin also runs other access points under other names for specific groups meeting in the hotel. Those will not be useful for Dragon*Con participants.

Consider Tethering

Clearly WiFi could be costly, depending on how you need to use it.

If you want to use your laptop without WiFi, you might look into ways to take advantage of your data-capable cellphone. This is commonly called tethering and can be very convenient if your provider supports it. Some require an extra monthly fee, consult your provider’s web site. Note that some don’t use the term “tethering”, for instance Sprint calls this practice “Phone as a Modem” in their billing scheme.

But what if your cell phone data provider doesn’t support tethering, or their solution isn’t compatible with your laptop OS or phone? There still may be a way. Lately I’ve been using a program called PDANet by June Fabrics and am quite happy with it. It supports most of the popular smartphone types and can turn the data connection you are already paying for into a laptop internet connection via USB or Bluetooth. You might give it a look.

Again, keep in mind that these hotel buildings are large steel and concrete structures, and some of the meeting rooms are fairly deep inside the buildings. Your 3G or 4G phone might not get a good signal down there. So don’t assume you’ll be able to use a tethered connection in a particular place until you’ve tested it.

If you don’t have a data capable phone or you can’t make tethering work, are you still out of luck? Perhaps not. Read on.

4G (WiMax and LTE) Coverage in Atlanta

In the last two years another option has appeared. A wide-area broadband service commonly called “4G” (but technically known as WiMax or LTE) has been deployed in a number of US cities, and Atlanta is one of them. These towers are shared by a number of internet providers, which means you can use 4G in Atlanta on a number of different services including the following:

• Clear
• Sprint – 4G
• Comcast – High-Speed 2go™ Wireless Internet
• Time Warner – Road Runner Mobile
• Verizon – LTE

If you happen to have service from one or more of these providers at home, I recommend you consider bringing your device with you to Atlanta. If you do not already have service, you might consider picking it up before you head to the show. Some of the providers even offer a “Day Pass” option that does not require you to have an ongoing contract, you just pay for the days on which you use it.

Once again, a caveat. 4G signals, particular WiMax, are notorious for poor penetration of buildings. Don’t assume you’ll get good 4G signals deep inside the lower levels of the convention hotel. We use it pretty successfully in the Skeptrack room and other rooms with windows (see below).

Rent your 4G!

Understandably, you may be dubious of signing up for a new wireless service just for this show. Or even if you are willing, these services are not nationwide and may not be available in your home town. There is another option!

There are at least two services I know of which will rent you a 4G capable device you can connect to your laptop or use as a portable hotspot. They are:

• 4G4Rent
• XCom Global

Several folks I know have had good success using these services to rent devices for use at conventions in Las Vegas.

4G Coverage in Downtown Atlanta

Again, be warned that wireless signals often fade deep inside the hotels. But they should be useful in places like the Skeptrack room which have windows.

I have personally tested the WiMax coverage at the Skeptrack room, and I was able to get 10 Megabits per second of download speed using a Macintosh, and 3.5 Megabits per second using my Android smartphone. This is considerably faster than most hotel WiFi providers. This is, in part, because of the large windows in the front of that room. Again, keep in mind that Dragon*Con is going to bring a huge number of people to downtown Atlanta all at once, so performance might be different during the convention.

Beware relying on it deeper within the hotel buildings. I found the speeds attainable in the Hyatt lobby and in the lower levels of the Marriott Marquis lobby were particularly poor.

Don’t Forget Power!

If you’re planning to live blog, live tweet and so on at the show, be mindful of your power requirements!

Unlike TAM in Las Vegas, power outlets are a little more accessible in the various track rooms at Dragon*Con. I’ve had my laptop plugged in in both the Skeptrack room and in other rooms last year. But as happens in airports, the available outlets might get claimed before you get there.

Even if you are using a mobile such as an iPhone for these purposes, constant tweeting and communication will eat up your battery much faster than normal phone use. The bottom line is: plan ahead. If your devices have removable batteries, buy extras and bring them with you! Be very diligent about recharging all your batteries each night so you start each day ahead of the game.

Bring extra charger cables for all your devices if you have them. If your devices can charge via a USB connection or from wall power, bring both kinds of cable. You never know when you might be short of power and sitting next to someone who is willing to let you charge from their laptop or notebook computer.

For portable devices that can charge from a USB port, there are a number of options in the form of an external battery packs. I found a couple of options on Amazon.com in my research. Splash makes this one that can charge two USB devices at once and includes a battery. It recharges from a USB cable, and comes with a set of adapters to allow it to power a number of different brands of cell phone and so on.

I have the Tekkeon TekCharge MP-1550 which is similar, but only has one output. The difference with this product is it uses replaceable AA batteries, which means its capacity is limited only by the number of rechargeable batteries you can keep handy. But on the downside, I’ve had bad luck using this device with certain phones which are very sensitive to voltage levels.

Your solution will depend on the devices you are using and what batteries they use.

Printing Added Since Original

If you need to get something printed while at the convention, there are at least two different FedEx Office (formerly Kinko’s) print shops right in the host hotels. Perfect for running off some extra copies of that flyer you wanted to hand out. (Bring your file in a common format like PDF on a thumb drive, or email it in).

Here’s their contact info:

Hilton

Hours: 8am to 7pm Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm Saturday, 11a to 5pm Sunday
Phone: (404) 221-6940
E-mail: usa0661@fedex.com

Marriott

Hours: 7am to 7pm Monday to Saturday, 9am to 5pm Sunday
Phone: (404) 586-6190
E-mail: usa0363@fedex.com

Although some FedEx locations offer free WiFi, neither of these do.

Conclusion & Notes

There are plenty of digital resources for the connected skeptic attending Dragon*Con 2010. Make good use of them to maximize the value you get out of the weekend.

Please comment or email or tweet me if you notice anything I got wrong or have additional information.

You can follow me on Twitter here.

Updated Aug 29: Fixed links to Pocket Program to go to the 8/29 revision that fixed a few errors; added note about alleged Boingo coverage at Hyatt.

Updated Aug 31: Added printing locations.

Twitter has been around for five years now, but there is still much confusion about what it is good for. How can you post anything useful in 140 characters? Isn’t it just people posting what they had for lunch? It’s a massive time waster. Those are typical complaints.

And yet there are several thousand self-proclaimed skeptics actively using Twitter quite effectively as a means of communication and organization. I quite like it myself. Unlike some complicated multi-purpose websites like Facebook, Twitter is dead simple. And you can do amazingly useful things with it.

“Like what?” you might ask. Well in the last week the science, journalism, skeptic and atheist communities on Twitter organized to pressure a law enforcement agency to take action on someone who has been a copious source of spam and death threats on the Internet for at least 15 years. Today’s arrest came about in under 10 days from the first moves.

I think the sequence of events of how this came together are quite interesting, and perhaps an object lesson in online activism. As it was happening I was capturing links to the relevant posts so I could document how it came about. Read on…

Setting the Stage

I really want to focus on the events of the last week, but to understand why so many people were so upset by this case, you have to know a bit of history, which goes back more than 15 years. This is not the story of an over-reaction to a garden variety troll. This person was the source of epic levels of spam, disruption and threats since the mid 1990s.

I’ll try to keep it as short as I can. If you are already familiar with the Mabus story, click here to jump to the end where I tell you about the events of last week.

If you are not familiar with David Mabus, do read through as it is a very interesting story and a pretty quick read. Up until now many of the details have been scattered across numerous blog posts.

Table of Contents

• Background: David Mabus
• And Mabus Twittered
• The Threats
• Finding The Person Behind Mabus
• The Beginning of an Obsession
• The Complaints
• The End Came in August
• Conclusion

Background: David Mabus

Skeptic and atheist webmasters, forum moderators and bloggers have known for some time of a character by the name David Mabus. He would appear periodically to post long-winded rants as forum or blog comments, or to make various rude threats. His posts would be deleted, his accounts banned, and he’d disappear for a while. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The name Mabus comes from the prophecies of Nostradamus. Believers in Nostradamus claim it is the name of the anti-Christ. Many of the earlier posts from this person would mention Nostradamus, sometimes claiming that he should have won the prize from James Randi‘s Million Dollar Challenge (MDC) and berating Randi for not awarding it.

I only became aware of him in 2008, but better known skeptics have known of him far longer. In a 2008 post James Randi recounts how Mabus made an incorrect prediction of nuclear war back in 1997. And PZ Myers says he has been getting messages from him on a daily basis since 1993. Many of these messages contain quite dire threats. In September 2009 PZ gathered up the threats sent in one evening and printed them out to show them to the police. Even in small print they came to 61 pages. The police were stunned.

In the last few years as skeptic activity on the internet increased, “Mabus” widened his target list. If you put up a blog or site, and your email address was publicly known, eventually you’d start to get the emails from him. These emails would contain rants similar or identical to whatever he was posting to blogs and forums at the time, and would usually be carbon copied to a litany of famous skeptics including James Randi, PZ Myers, Michael Shermer and so on. (Some skeptics, flattered to see themselves listed in such company, would sometimes sheepishly admit to thinking they had “made it” as a skeptic upon receiving their first Mabus email, despite the threatening nature of these messages).

Much of what he posts gets deleted for being off topic, threatening or just plain incomprehensible. And yet all over the net, on various sorts of sites, random flotsam and jetsam of his posts still survives. It’s like the digital version of someone constantly driving around town hurling leaflets out his car window, not caring if anyone ever picks them up.

The emails never made all that much sense, but gradually they seemed to decay even further. I thought about quoting two of them here, but there is no real point. Suffice it to say they started out as semi-coherent rants about Randi or about atheism, and gradually declined to mere shouting. This decay was the first red flag for many of us.

Red flag number two came last October 1st when he showed up at an atheist convention where PZ Myers was speaking and Tessa Brown took his picture. Most Internet trolls would never dream of personally confronting their targets. The fact that he did this set him apart.

Red flag number three came in waves beginning on January 19th, 2011. That was the day David Mabus decided to expand his campaign to Twitter.

And Mabus Twittered

Mabus had apparently toyed with Twitter before. During The Amazing Meeting 7 in July 2009, he set up an account named @davidmabus (naturally enough) and sent some taunts, typically mentioning the JREF MDC. Later that year and the next there is evidence he set up some other accounts but did nothing with them.

But in January he started a Twitter campaign of epic proportions. Because posts on Twitter are by default public, and anyone can send a reply to anyone simply by typing the “@” character appropriately, it is ideally suited for Mabus’ brand of harassment. The 140-character limit of Twitter is not well suited to long-winded rants, but he quickly discovered that you can compensate for that by including a hyperlink.

He began sending links, over and over, to any and all skeptics or atheists he could find on Twitter. Early on the links led to a YouTube of Depeche Mode‘s music video for “Enjoy the Silence” (the one shot on top of the World Trade Center). I’ll explain the significance of this later, but the video had titles added to it which threatened atheists. Later Twitter posts dropped the YouTube link and switched to links to forum posts of the same sort of rants he had been posting all along.

@doctoratlantis
CLOBBERING TIME

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION – JAN 1, 2011

http://www.youtube.com/user/xviolatex?feature=mhum—
David Mabus (@orobotsx) January 20, 2011

(A post from early in his Twitter campaign – the YouTube link no longer leads to the video it did at the time).

His posts changed from time to time. He would switch URLs when his manifestos were inevitably deleted and he would switch taglines. Early on he used the phrases “clobbering time” and “the end of atheism”.

Some of the taglines didn’t make much sense and became the subject of nervous joking by threatened skeptics. In February he started exhorting people to look into the cornfield, and his manifesto included a photo of a scarecrow (see below). And one of the most famous lines in his emails literally said “GOATS ON FIRE….”

Some tweets were directed at a single person, but a majority included several @ mentions to spam multiple people at once. (He’s nothing if not efficient). Sometimes he would scan down the Twitter page of a particular user and reply to every single post he saw. Sometimes he would search for PZ Myers’ name or his own name and reply to what he saw. Other times he would pick people out of the blue to harass.

A Surlyramic (wearable art) made by skeptics trying to cope with the inanity of the Mabus campaign. Click to see source.

Naturally people would use the block function on Twitter on him when he appeared. When enough people block an account quickly enough on Twitter, the account itself is suspended. But this rarely slowed down Mabus very much. He would create another account and continue.

The volume was stunning and the rate was obsessive, to say the very least. Until the end of February, I tracked what what he was posting on Twitter pretty closely, using the BackTweets service to locate his (often long-deleted) posts via the URL he was using on a given day. In five weeks he went through over 330 Twitter accounts.

Near as I can tell, all this posting was done by hand. The posts would be marked as having come from the Twitter web site, and there is no evidence that he was using a script or a robot to do the work for him. He would just sit there and cut and paste.

He would spend hours at it. For example, on February 25th I found 25 separate accounts he used. Based on the timestamps of the posts, he started around 7:30am, and posted more or less continuously until about 10am. He continued somewhat more slowly until noon, when I presume he took a break for lunch. He resumed at 3pm, and posted until 9pm that night. I counted almost 700 tweets. And because of the way Twitter was deleting each account (and all its output) when they noticed the spamming, all of that output from that day was gone within minutes. Disappeared.

And that was part of the problem. He would post hundreds and hundreds of spams, such as this one above. But mixed in with endless repetitions of that sort of thing, would come the direct confrontations and threats. Here is a relatively tame one directed at me that also still survives on Twitter:

@krelnik you are a nonsensical little idiot, farley.. nice to have you exposed—
David Mabus (@orobotsx) January 20, 2011

Even just the endless hitting of to the Twitter block button itself got tiring when you have to do it 25 times a day because of changing account names. This led me to write an epic how-to blog (including a demonstration video) on using the filtering functionality of Twitter clients to block Mabus using his URLs.

The Threats

As this story has played out, I’ve seen a few bloggers minimize the nature of the threats. That one above isn’t that bad, after all. Some view a certain degree of this to be part of the wild, anything goes nature of the Internet. I don’t entirely disagree – you have to have a thick skin if you are involved in discussions on the net.

But let me assure you, Mabus’ threats go way beyond the norm, both in content and sheer volume. I talked about the volume above, so let’s see some of the content.

He tells people they are going to die that day or “cease to exist”. He threatens executions. He uses offensive terms starting with “bitch” and getting far worse. He threatens people’s loved ones, such as this one from February 10:

He threatens to cut off people’s heads and tells them they are “finished.” He asks people if they think they “deserve to live”. He says he is going to “pound you into the dust” and that you will suffer the “worst form of torture.” Here’s one threat directed at Michael Shermer from April 18:

He doesn’t limit his threats to well known public figures like Myers or Shermer. He’s even threatened young adults directly. Here’s one of several threats directed at a teenage boy in Wales, Rhys Morgan:

And finally, here’s a particularly nice one directed at me just a few weeks ago:

These are but samples. There are hundreds and hundreds more.

Because of the rules violations of the accounts, the threats would disappear along with the spam. So if you weren’t alert and ready to take a screen shot, these threats would disappear. I collected the ones I saw in time.

I managed to capture about 60 threats to me and about 30 to other people, but I know hundreds of Twitter users were affected by this. Some of the others who collected screen shots and posted them publicly are Heather Henderson and Martin S. Pribble.

In encourage you to click those links and see more. It was a truly sick campaign that went on for more than six months. And the threats were clearly violations of the law.

Finding The Person Behind Mabus

So, how did we put a name to the threats, to even know which police department to call? It was easier than you might expect.

If Mabus had truly wanted to remain anonymous, there are tools and methods to accomplish that quite effectively. Fortunately for us (and unfortunately for him) Mabus didn’t seem to be aware of many of these methods. In fact, he seemed technically inept sometimes. The hilariously awkward titles on his Depeche Mode video hint at this – they were created by screen-capturing a scrolling Microsoft Word window, toolbars and all!

An image of a scarecrow used by Mabus in conjuction with the "look into the cornfields" tagline. (Copyrighted image Mabus used illegally, click for original owner. Fair use of thumbnail claimed here).

He did do two simple things that helped him a bit. He used throwaway email accounts on free webmail services to send many (but not all) of the email spams over the years. And when posting his rants (and, I presume, while on Twitter) he would connect to the Internet using the free WiFi provided at internet cafes, hotel lobbies and college libraries at various locations around Montreal. That made it harder to tie the posts to a particular person such as through an ISP.

In many of the articles to which I link, Mabus’ real name is freely mentioned. This is because Mabus was never too careful about concealing it in his online postings. If I hadn’t already seen his real name in that 2008 post by James Randi, all I had to do was wait. The fifth email he sent me, on May 27, 2009, had his real name in his return address, next to the throwaway email account davemabus8765@email.com. (More evidence of his technical ineptitude).

Once we know his name, and the fact that he posts from Montreal (which the IP addresses on his emails tell us), we can proceed quite quickly. For instance, there are only three publicly listed phone numbers for that last name in Montreal. One of them turns out to be his mom. (Please don’t try to call her, if what she says in this article are accurate quotes, clearly there is no point).

PZ mentioned that Mabus was active on Usenet news years ago, so Google Groups can be used to find his earliest posts. (Be sure to restrict your search to years prior to 2005 or so or else you’ll find much recent discussion of his activities and not much of his own posts).

You can easily find evidence that he has been spamming since 1995 – but in those days it was advertising for various stereo and computer stores he worked for. If you trace through those computer store ads, you eventually come to the one he apparently worked for until very recently. Looking up that store’s domain names in WHOIS will lead you back to the telephone listing for his mom.

One quite frightening thing you can find in Google Groups is him expressing an interest in making a bomb in 1995 and using it to blow up government buildings.

The Beginning of an Obsession

But the most interesting stuff pops up if you add Nostradamus to the search.

It is here that you finally learn the reason for both the name “David Mabus” and his fascination with Depeche Mode. The answer is in Nostradamus’ Quatrain 8,66:

When the inscription 500 A.D. is revealed
Quand l’enscriture D.M. trouvee

In an ancient cave, illuminated by a lamp,
En cave antique a lampe discouverte,

The law, King, & Prince by Roman law are examined,
Loi, Roy, & Prince Ulpian esprouvee,

The House of the Queen & the Duke are overshadowed.
Pavillon Royne & Duc sous la couvert.

The original French is in italics, as you can see a date is represented as “D.M.” in the French. But if you read that Usenet conversation, it appears Mabus somehow became convinced that “D.M.” were actually a set of initials. “D.M.” are his real-life initials, as well that of his nom-de-plume. And in his efforts to find other things they might match, he found Depeche Mode as well.

Seven years later when 9-11 happened, and some people claimed Nostradamus had predicted it, Mabus no doubt flashed back to that Depeche Mode video that was filmed at the top of the World Trade Center. He would at various points make claims that Nostradamus or himself had predicted the 9-11 attacks. It was no doubt all downhill from there.

You can see how all this old research is completely consistent with what we know about the current Mabus. It all fits together.

(In retrospect, when I said I’d try to keep it short I was beyond optimistic. Ah well).

The Complaints

As documented above, Mabus Twitter campaign had him threatening and annoying many hundreds more people than he had ever affected before. When the threats started coming quite rapidly, this led to calls for him to be arrested and so on.

I got some particularly nasty threats early on, and started searching for the appropriate way to complain. Knowing he was in Montreal and even having an address and phone number for his family, I figured the local police in Montreal would be the natural choice. They seemed unwilling to take my call. When I finally did get an answer from them, they said I had to complain to my local police department. Fair enough, my local police can verify my identity more easily, after all.

And so on a Saturday in January, I killed one whole afternoon at my local Atlanta Police zone office filling out paperwork with a detective. She told me I could get a copy of the incident report within a few days at another office.

Others did the same thing. Phil Plait gave a report to a sheriff by telephone. Michael Shermer told me he obtained a restraining order to ensure Mabus would stay clear of him. Canadian skeptic Steve Thoms and blogger Greg Laden also filed reports. There are no doubt others.

On February 10, 2011 I was finally able to get a copy of my report from yet another Atlanta Police office across town. I quickly took it to a local print shop and faxed it to the Montreal Police.

And nothing happened. For me or for anyone else.

Months went by. People got frustrated, and often complained on Twitter. Other victims such as @Inrideo and Travis Roy attempted to interest Canada’s RCMP to no avail.

But the threats continued. If anything, they accelerated day by day. Even when people mentioned contacting the police, Mabus mostly scoffed as you can see above.

The End Came in August

And now we come to the part of the story I really wanted to tell. Many of us knew that getting the local Montreal press involved in the story might be a key to spurring the police into action. Back in February I had attempted to make this happen with this tweet:

I wonder if @CBCMontreal @mtlgazette @ctvmontreal @Global_Montreal are aware of the constant Twitter harassment coming from a someone there?—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) February 12, 2011

By @ mentioning several Montreal journalists, not only was I soliciting a reply from those journalists, but knowing Mabus’ M.O. I expected him to include those journalists in his spams (and perhaps his threats), letting them experience it up close.

As you can see at right, that did happen. In subsequent days I was able to contact one journalist at CTV Montreal, but he was unsuccessful in getting his editors interested in the Mabus story. It was a dead end.

As it turned out, I had the exactly right idea, but simply picked the wrong journalists.

Monday, August 8, 2011

Montrealer William Raillant-Clark (@wraillantclark) is a press atttaché for the University of Montreal. He would have been the right journalist, had I found him.

On the morning of August 8 he was monitoring Twitter as part of his job. He noticed this retweet by science writer Carl Zimmer:

“@pzmyers: 4 more mabus accts killed. Does he know it takes one click for me to block an account and every single one of its twits?” Shhh!—
  (@carlzimmer) August 08, 2011

Since he talks with scientists online all the time, he had seen some of the Mabus posts before. He dug a little bit and found this hashtagged tweet by Heather Henderson, (a singer and atheist podcaster who had performed at TAM last month). It was posted the day before:

#montreal 911 I'm being harassed by Peter Lemesurier/Dave Mabus/Dennis Markuze RT @xd80454545: @HeatherHenderso and ur a lying cunt.—
HeatherHenderson (@HeatherHenderso) August 07, 2011

His curiosity was piqued. Was this Mabus more than just a spammer or troll? So he asked a question publicly about the situation, and this was what transpired:

@pzmyers @carlzimmer Referring to guy @HeatherHenderso tweeted about? @SPVM Montreal police act on twitter threats – have u filed complaint?—
William Raillant (@wraillantclark) August 08, 2011

Multiple people, multiple complaints. No, they don't. RT @wraillantclark: @SPVM police act on twitter threats – have u filed complaint?—
PZ Myers (@pzmyers) August 08, 2011

@pzmyers That is disturbing & odd. @SPVM has acted on twitter threats to Quebec journalists (eg branchez-vous.com/info/actualite…), you deserve the same.

—
William Raillant (@wraillantclark) August 08, 2011

Going 2 write article about this mabus harassment & police inaction @HeatherHenderso can I use ur pix? @Inrideo how did u find IRL details?—
William Raillant (@wraillantclark) August 08, 2011

As a press atttaché, he is connected in the Montreal press community. He knew that if he got the right journalists interested in the story and they wrote about it, something would happen. So he did some more research online using Twitter.

@Inrideo I was just informed that the @SPVM did approach him once in the past, but no charges were laid. For me, this is unacceptable.

—
William Raillant (@wraillantclark) August 08, 2011

@cuttlefishpoet YES! Please email them to me at rw.raillantclark@gmail.com—
William Raillant (@wraillantclark) August 08, 2011

Canadian Twitter user @Inrideo was part of that conversation as you can see. When he had attempted to report Mabus to the RCMP previously, he had contacted me for additional evidence and information. So around noon on August 8, he contacted me via Twitter to point out that Clark was planning an article. This was key, because since I was not following Clark, I hadn’t seen any of the conversation above.

The Montreal Police have a Twitter account (@SPVM) and they did take notice of the conversation. They sent this message:

@HeatherHenderso @wraillantclark @carlzimmer @pzmyers you can send the info to relations.medias@spvm.qc.ca and we will refered you—
Police Montréal (@SPVM) August 08, 2011

The fact that they included their email address will become important in a moment.

I emailed Clark with reams of details about the history of David Mabus, similar to the introductory sections of this blog. Heather Henderson volunteered her screen shots. Clark set to work on a post and making phone calls.

The result was this Tumblr post, which appeared in the late afternoon of August 8: Police Pontificate as Montrealer Threatens to Murder Science Journalists.

Clark tweeted it and I quickly followed:

#Montreal man threatens to murder #science journalists, @SPVM & @RCMPGRCPolice do nothing rwrc.tumblr.com/post/866018634… mabus #media #quebec #canada—
William Raillant (@wraillantclark) August 08, 2011

Will @SPVM take notice now that they've been called out on Mabus? http://bit.ly/qRIjOo cc: @Inrideo @HeatherHenderso @Sc00ter @pzmyers @jref—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) August 08, 2011

I will predict…no. Not at all. RT @krelnik: Will @SPVM take notice now that they've been called out on Mabus?—
PZ Myers (@pzmyers) August 08, 2011

PZ Myers’ doubting notwithstanding, BackTweets says the post was retweeted over 174 times in the next week. According to a competing service WhoTweetedMe, the post was retweeted over 291 times and potentially reached up to 10,000 different people. (Clark reported on Thursday that the post had been viewed almost 14,000 times).

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Remember those two tweets above which contained email addresses? Mabus, noticing that Clark had been conversing with @pzmyers, did what he often does – he spammed. Clark got a copy of Mabus’ usual threatening manifesto via email in the middle of the night.

Picture of a dead bird Mabus includes in his posts near the phrase "Omens of Death"

I got a copy of this email too, as did the Montreal Police themselves since they were part of the conversation. Yes, you read that right – Mabus sent one of his threatening emails directly to the Montreal Police.

I don’t know what Montreal Police’s reaction to that first email was, but those of us who have been getting them all along are a bit jaded by now. We rarely read more than the first few lines, if at all.

But Clark had never received one before! He read it with fresh eyes, and he was shocked by what he saw. He knew what he had to do. He needed to contact the Montreal Police himself. Because he is a local resident, they had to pay attention to him.

By that afternoon, there was a public indication that SPVM was on the case:

@HeatherHenderso we have investigators by now on that case – story to follow – thank you for your help!—
Police Montréal (@SPVM) August 09, 2011

Meanwhile, the retweets of the Tumblr post were working their magic. At some point on Tuesday, they caught the eye of Kyle VanderBeek, a skeptic who works for change.org in San Francisco.

Kyle saw those tweets with the emails in them, and knew he had a potential tool right at his fingertips. He created a petition titled “Montreal Police: Take “Mabus” death threats seriously” and configured it to send responses directly to the SPVM public email address (which we saw above).

He, of course tweeted about it to get the ball rolling:

Hey, @krelnik, I started a petition targeting the Montreal PD asking them to take Mabus seriously change.org/petitions/mont… #skeptic—
Kyle VanderBeek (@kvbeek) August 09, 2011

Looking for #skeptic support for my Mabus petition. Signatures send to Montreal PD. http://chn.ge/nbomhp @SurlyAmy @pzmyers @BrianDunning—
Kyle VanderBeek (@kvbeek) August 09, 2011

And he made sure to thank people as they signed it, to keep excitement high:

@rhysmorgan Thanks for signing my petition!—
Kyle VanderBeek (@kvbeek) August 10, 2011

According to BackTweets it was retweeted over 500 times. The competing service WhoTweetedMe comes up with approximately the same numbers, and estimates that an astonishing 450,000 people could have seen those tweets! That’s huge.

In addition, several skeptic and atheist bloggers wrote about the petition. That created more reach and visibility beyond Twitter.

That evening, hundreds of people signed the petition. Every one of those sent an email to SPVM.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

On the morning of the 10th, the Montreal Police cried “Oncle!” with this Tweet:

Please stop sendind e-mails to our media adresse by signinig the petition.We are investigating the case. Thank you fou your help.—
Police Montréal (@SPVM) August 10, 2011

Seeing all this activity and discussion of him online, Mabus was as active as he has ever been during this period. He posted a new version of his manifesto to Google Groups, and was spamming it to anyone and everyone, with copies to @SPVM! (Because of BackTweet’s freemium business model, that link might not show much if you are reading this at or after the end of August 2011).

Kyle VanderBeek became one of Mabus’ targets and he started receiving Mabus threats and spam too.

We felt like we were almost there! But remember I said William Raillant-Clark had press contacts? Those started to pay off on August 10. In the afternoon, I got phone calls from two different reporters and from the SPVM detective assigned to the Mabus case! (One of the reporters suggested to me that the detective called me because he had just called her, but I have no way of verifying that).

The reporter calls would pay off the next day.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

On Thursday the mainstream media went with the Mabus story. First La Presse (the largest French-language newspaper in Canada) posted their story, titled “Die, Atheists, Die!” (Here is a Google translated version of that story in English). This was shortly followed by the Montreal Gazette, whose story is titled “Montreal police start probe of Twitter threats“. I am quoted in both of those stories.

Press coverage continued through the day as the wire services noticed the story and distributed it to papers all over Canada. Here is one from the Toronto Sun titled “Montreal cops probe Internet death threats” for which I was interviewed during the day on Thursday.

And finally, TV. William Raillant-Clark figures prominently in this report (and other versions of it) hitting the CBC evening news that night:

There are other stories as well. One of my favorites was this late-night follow up from the Montreal Gazette entitled “Montreal police goaded into investigating cyber-crank.” I like it because it coins the phrase “truculent cyber-crank” and because its original headline (still visible in the URL) was “Montreal police spammed into submission.” Spamming undid the spammer.

Naturally I can’t give too many details about what was going on off Twitter, but during this period I spoke with the SPVM detective several times, and provided all sorts of evidence in the form of archived emails, screen shots, IP address traces and so on. I also helped find other people who had reported Mabus to the police and get them the detective’s contact info.

But on Thursday evening, something odd happened.

Mabus went silent. One last email was sent around 9:57pm Eastern time. And then, a series of apologies appeared.

@Pribbzilla @krelnik @wraillantclark @kvbeek we're willing to give you guys a way out… we don't war with you and you dont want war with us—
JohnHogu39494949 (@johnhog39399959) August 12, 2011

@drpaulmorgan @rhysmorgan we're just want to say we're sorry for anything we may of said. we would never hurt you. you are not our enemies.—
DaveMabus (@davemabs2333) August 12, 2011

@Inrideo and finally u - lest we forget - we apologize for any threats.we would never hurt you. we want you to wise up on the atheist issue

—
johnhogu44994 (@davemabus434222) August 12, 2011

@rebeccawatson rebecca we want to apologize for any threats. we would never hurt you. we just want you to wise up on the atheist issue—
DaveMabus (@davemabus392939) August 12, 2011

@surlyamy amy we want to apologize for any threats. we would never hurt you. we just want you to wise up on the atheist issue—
DaveMabus39838438 (@davemabus393939) August 12, 2011

Nothing has been heard from Mabus since.

Monday, August 15, 2011

SPVM officially announced that a case had been opened regarding Mabus and investigators were on the case:

Thank You for your interest in the #Mabus issue. Case is open and we are actively investigating. We can't comment until invest is complete—
Police Montréal (@SPVM) August 15, 2011

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Mabus is arrested, I was told privately by the detective.

Today, Wednesday, August 17, 2011

SPVM announces the arrest on Twitter:

#Mabus investigation – Today, a suspect was arrested. To everyone, thank you for your help and patience.—
Police Montréal (@SPVM) August 17, 2011

Update 5:33pm EDT: The story is hitting the news in Canada tonight.

Update August 18, 8:18am EDT: This news story confirms that the petition was key to getting the police moving, they doubted the seriousness of William Raillant-Clark’s complaint at first.

Update August 19, 5:18pm EDT: Mabus appeared in court on Friday and now faces 16 charges. He was ordered to undergo a 30-day psychological evaluation, and will appear in court again on September 19.

Conclusion

Twitter can be a excellent medium to organize people across time zones and countries to achieve a specific activism goal. Other actions (petitions, emails, official complaints, mainstream press attention) may be required as part of the campaign, but Twitter can be the kickoff point.

People had used blogging and direct contact of the police for years to attempt to get some closure in the Mabus case, to no avail. Harnessing the power of a large number of Twitter users, through the interlocking networks of different people, was key.

A few Twitter tips or “best practices” emerge from how this story went down:

• The default public nature of Twitter posts is key – it allows people who don’t know you to notice your posts
• Hashtags (like #montreal) can serve to get attention of those who may not follow you
• Retweets work to get the word out
• @ Mentions help call content to the attention of people who wouldn’t have seen it
• Persistence is key – if I had stuck with my idea of contacting journalists, this would have happened months earlier
• If you’re trying to get someone’s attention, give them something they want. (Mabus likes to email, two of the posts contained email addresses).
• Being a pack rat can be useful – all the screen shots and other stuff I collected about Mabus in February were a gold mine.
• Petitions can work, when properly targeted!

This post has been wildly popular, I hope you enjoyed it. If you would like to show your appreciation, then use the link below to purchase something for yourself or a loved one at Amazon.com. I receive a small commission and you pay nothing extra. Thank you.

Thank you to @wraillantclark, @kvbeek, @HeatherHenderso, @Inrideo and the many other folks on Twitter who contributed to this story through their actions. Without them, we’d all still be deleting Mabus posts and wondering what he was going to do next.

Oh, and you can follow me on Twitter here.

There’s much excitement in skepticism these days, in part because Internet technologies have enabled an influx of new people who are enthusiastic and want to be involved. But as Barbara Drescher lamented over the weekend, many enthusiastic folks who have jumped into skepticism have not yet had time to fully familiarize themselves with the years of work that has gone on since the creation of CSICOP in the mid-1970s. As a new skeptic, how do you catch up with 40+ years of work?

Well, CSI (as CSICOP renamed itself a few years ago) has made it super easy. As publishers of Skeptical Inquirer, they’ve been one of the main chroniclers of skepticism since the very beginning. Like most magazine publishers, they’ve had a digital archive of back issues available for over five years from their web site.

However, up until a few weeks ago it was a $150 product. That price might have given many skeptics pause. Especially younger skeptics who are used to getting everything for free online.

But that has changed! Now the Skeptical Inquirer DVD or CD is only $25. That’s really an incredible price for 29 years of investigations, research and more. I picked up a copy myself.

The collection provides every issue of Skeptical Inquirer from the first 29 years, in the form of Adobe PDF files. You get 169 files in about 1.5 Gigabytes (1.63 billion bytes), including a pre-built keyword index. Most folks easily have room to copy the entire archive to their computer for instant use.

Most personal computers these days ship with software to read these files built-in, whether it be Adobe’s own Reader or some alternative such as the Preview program that ships on Mac OSX. So making use of this archive is as simple as copying the files to your computer and double-clicking.

If you use Adobe’s software for these files, a keyword index is pre-built on the disk for you. Or you can rely on the system search utility (such as Apple’s Spotlight) that is built in to your computer – most such software automatically knows how to index PDFs. I copied the files to my Mac laptop, and within a few minutes I could hit Command-Spacebar and search for skeptic topics in back issues in seconds, even when the Internet is unavailable.

I highly recommend any serious skeptic get this disk and make use of it on a regular basis. Just in the first couple days of using it, I was able to correct a date in a Wikipedia article about a lake monster and add a footnote to another article about a scientist. And that was just while browsing around. I’ve already found several new items to add to Skeptic History, and I expect to find many more.

So bust out your credit card, and order a copy in the CSI Online Store. You’ll be a better informed skeptic with this in your toolbox.

In June Canadian skeptic Erik Davis launched a site called The WOT Project. His focus is the opposite side of the equation: protecting the WOT ratings of skeptic sites. Each week the WOT Project posts a list of skeptic sites and encourages participating skeptics to give them a good rating in WOT. The sixth such set was published on Monday.

Since WOT has an API, the ratings can be measured over time. Since my two most recent blog posts were about measuring skeptic outreach on Wikipedia, I thought it would be appropriate to do this for WOT as well. So let’s see how well has WOT Project done in their efforts to protect skeptic web sites on WOT.

Methodology

My first blog post on WOT contained some stats on WOT’s current ratings for skeptic and believer websites. I generated those using a script to pull the WOT ratings en masse using their published API. So I have data on the WOT ratings of several hundred skeptic websites as they stood in March that can be used as a baseline.

Of the 50 websites posted in the first five WOT Project posts, I had data from March on 43. I then used the same script to pull current WOT ratings for all 50 sites. It is straightforward to compare the two sets of data. (I didn’t use the sites posted in WOT Project Volume 6 because they were just posted on Monday – there hasn’t been much chance for them to improve yet).

WOT compiles four scores (trustworthiness, reliability, privacy and child safety) with a confidence value reported on each score. As before, I’m going to focus on the trustworthiness score here, as it is clearly the most relevant to skeptic sites.

Results

Here’s how the sites stood back in March, click for a larger version:

As you can see, we weren’t in bad shape to begin with (as my original blog post had indicated) – a total of 88% of the sites had Good or Excellent trustworthiness, and thus would have a green icon in WOT. But at the same time about 12% had either bad scores or no score at all.

Confidence values are not terrific, with only about 28% of the sites having high confidence scores (top two results). A larger number of sites have zero confidence (33%). That’s not good because it means our site scores could potentially be changed easily by those with an axe to grind about skeptics.

Here’s how the 50 sites in the first five WOT Project sets stand as of July 25 (about 6 weeks of crowdsourced work). Again, click for a larger version:

Clearly, a big win. All fifty sites now have green icons, and a much larger percentage have “Excellent” as opposed to “Good” trustworthiness.

Confidence is much increased as well, with no sites left with zero confidence, and 42% of them up in the highest confidence tier.

Conclusion

Although many skeptic sites already had good ratings in Web of Trust, The WOT Project has clearly demonstrated its value in its first six weeks. Overall ratings have been improved, and none of the selected sites show yellow or red icons any longer. Confidence values have improved as well, presumably helping to insulate the ratings of skeptic sites against malicious attacks by believers.

The WOT Project is an excellent example of an online skeptical tool with a simple goal that makes great use of crowdsourcing. I congratulate Erik on his efforts and encourage all web-surfing skeptics to get involved.

The main page of the English Wikipedia is apparently used by many as an entry point. It currently receives between 4 and 5 million page views every day. That’s a tremendous amount of traffic, and it guarantees that anything linked from that page is going attract alot of readers.

Like the rest of Wikipedia, the Did You Know? feature is collaboratively edited. Anyone can nominate a page to appear there, as long as they follow certain rules. When I create a new article that is relevant to skepticism, I nominate it in the hopes that it will be displayed here one day. The goal is to get the attention of those 4 million people, and expose them to skepticism.

But how effective is this? Fortunately, Wikipedia’s transparency allows us to examine the traffic numbers and answer that question. In this article I hope to show it is a very good way to get new people exposed to skeptic concepts.

Robert S. Lancaster, July 2010

On July 9, 2010 I posted a Wikipedia biography page for skeptic Robert S. Lancaster, creator of the Stop Sylvia Browne website. It made an appearance in the Did You Know feature on July 23, 2010 at 2pm Eastern U.S. time. It looked like this:

Did you know…

• … that Robert S. Lancaster created the website StopSylvia.com because he found Sylvia Browne‘s claims of psychic knowledge about missing children to be “incredibly offensive”?

 

Like all Did You Knows it only appeared on the front page for a few hours. So what good did that do? Well, let’s go find out. We can use the tool at stats.grok.se to examine the number of page views each of the four articles linked in the item got that day.

Using stats.grok.se I graphed the statistics for Robert S. Lancaster as well as the four other articles that appeared in his item: Sylvia Browne, Psychic and Missing Person. The image at right shows the day-to-day stats for the four articles, and the traffic spike for each is undeniable. Click to embiggen. (Note the spike is on July 24 in these graphs due to time zone issues: he appeared on the afternoon of July 23 in U.S. time zones, but most of the rest of the world was in July 24 at that time).

We can conclude that around 4,800 people read about Robert who would not have otherwise. In addition, around 4,400 looked at Sylvia Browne, 1,400 at Psychic and 1,200 at Missing person who (based on the day-to-day statistics) would not have otherwise. That’s a significant bump for all those articles, anywhere from 7 times to 49 times the normal traffic level.

But are these readers engaged? Are they interested in what they are reading? One way we might tell that is by looking at the stats for links within the article. If we see those articles spike too, a likely explanation is readers are digging deeper and learning more. That would be a good sign.

Visits to James Randi's bio in July 2010

To check this, I looked at the stats for several skeptic-relevant articles that were linked from the original article:

• Shawn Hornbeck got 369 additional visitors
• Kaz Demille-Jacobsen (subsequently deleted) got 917 additional visitors
• The Amazing Meeting got 155 additional visitors
• Penn Radio got 80 additional visitors
• The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe got 135 additional visitors
• James Randi Educational Foundation got 730 additional visitors
• James Randi got 1,200 additional visitors

As one might expect, there is a considerable drop-off from the 4,000-odd people who looked at the main article. But still, it is a significant exposure and does seem to indicate people are engaged in the content of the article and are interested in learning more.

I’d like to point out that last link, the one to James Randi’s biography, which is also shown in the graph at right here. The only place that is linked in the original article is in a photo caption! More evidence that adding photos to articles helps, something I’m sure Susan Gerbic will appreciate. (She’s contributed tons of photos from skeptic events to Wikipedia).

Karen Stollznow, July 2011

So let’s take a look at the results for Karen Stollznow’s Did You Know, mentioned at the top of this article. It appeared from noon to 8pm on Saturday (Eastern U.S. time) and looked like this:

Did you know…

• … that Karen Stollznow writes for two skeptical magazines (Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer) and hosts two skeptical podcasts (Point of Inquiry and Monster Talk)?

 

(Note: Monster Talk is not hyperlinked in the above because it did not have a Wikipedia article at the time this Did You Know was submitted). So let’s look at the statistics.

Again we see a clear boost in page views for every one of the articles linked in the hook, except for “Podcasts” which shows no change at all. (Not too surprising, most people are familiar with what a podcast is in 2011). Excerpts from the graphs are below at right, click for a larger version. The actual numbers with links to the original graphs are below at left.

• Karen Stollznow got over 1,000 additional views
• Scientific skepticism got over 500 extra views
• Skeptic magazine got 400 extra views
• Skeptical Inquirer got about 340 extra views
• Podcast showed no appreciable change
• Point of Inquiry got about 135 extra views

Clearly this effort was not quite as successful as the first example. The numbers could have been affected by a number of factors such as time of day, the actual contents of the hook, what else was on the front page at the time, where the hook appears in the list and so on. (Few of these are under the submitter’s control, as a number of different editors participate in putting together the feature). I suspect the news stories were the biggest factor here, both Amy Winehouse’s death and the Oslo attacks were prominently featured on the Wikipedia main page at the same time.

But there is still a clear benefit: over 1,000 people have read about Karen Stollznow’s work as a skeptic who would not otherwise have known about her, and hundreds of people clicked the other skeptic links that appeared with her.

Conclusion

Clearly, getting new and expanded articles on skeptic topics listed in Did You Know is an excellent way to expose the general Wikipedia audience to material on skeptic topics. Articles appearing there get a boost in their traffic, and thus (sometimes huge) exposure. Further, secondary links in the DYK “hook” (the text on the main page) also receive a benefit, as do any links within the articles.

Best practices

When doing significant editing to Wikipedia, everyone should keep in mind:

• Brand new and recently expanded articles should be listed for Did You Know whenever possible
• Articles should be in as close to a finished form as possible when initially posted, to smooth passage through DYK quality control and to present a good face to readers
• When possible, the DYK hook should be composed to include links to other articles that we want seen
• Don’t forget to include in-article links to other skeptic articles as people do continue to browse.
• Because photos attract attention, links to other articles in photo captions are also very important.

Note: There is currently a discussion amongst Wikipedia volunteers about what the contents of the main page should be in the future. I’m noticing quite a bit of negativity about the Did You Know feature from some editors. While the consensus as I write this still seems to be to keep this feature, it might be dropped eventually. I encourage you to make use of it for the purposes described here while it is still around. It might disappear and we will have to find other methods.