ever heard of "astroturfing"?

[gh]

That's where vested interests pretend to be Joe Citizen doing a blog. This was new to me:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 01&sc=1000

[Marlow]

The TOE likes it!

Words like this (or spam, phishing, etc.) are great additions to the culture, because they describe things that heretofore didn't exist, but happen in our lives and we need to discuss them. This seems like a fortuitous time to be a semantics, linguistic, lexicography kinda guy. The blogosphere is teeming with neologisms.

[tandfman]

To me, this is not much different from the think tanks that adopt neutral sounding names (e.g., The Center for ______ Studies) when, in fact, they are nothing more than apologists for partisan interests. They try to look like objective scholars or researchers, and too often they are nothing of the kind.