Skip to main content

The social aggregation of clunk and junk

Hello, and thank you for reading this letter. There is a starving little boy in XYZ who has no arms, no legs, no parents. This little boy's life could be saved, because for every time you pass this on, a dollar will be donated to the Little Starving Legless Armless Boy from XYZ Fund. Forward this to atleast 10 people so that we get enough money blah blah blah.

How many of us have received this email in the past? I believe it is safely to say all, it was prominent in the olden days of Yahoo when email was a private affair not the thing you would discuss with your friend over the wall. I do not know how effective the campaign was but people did hit forward to the mail. I mean how easy it is to just forward it? Who knows maybe there is a boy in it. We have forwarded many such emails in the past, some people still do.

Sometimes they contain blessing from some God who will curse you if you don't do things etc. But nowadays this forwards have stopped being funny and have turned into serious news forwards. Today morning, as I walked into office I received a email from friend about a very sensitive letter written to the prime minister of India by the editor of the times of India, Mumbai. The contents of the letter were sensitive and maybe true to the fact, they contained the sentiment of many people.

However the main concern was? Why choose the name of the tabloid and the editor? To give it credit. Any campaign needs credit and the name was a credit. So I simply Googled the name of the editor to see if the name held any credit.


This is a snap of what were the top results in the name of the editor. If we observe carefully most of them are  personal blogs and discussion forums carrying the same email forwards text. The news that was in the email is simply and mindlessly published on the forums as quickly as it spread. 

The letter is sensitive and the people will have a tendency to forward it, which is only fair. But this creates a aggregation of the fake news and a cloud of junk which may hide one single authentic link for the source. 

What can be done for it? Obviously there are moral obligations of checking what you post on the blog and forward emails but obviously if it was really to be done, we won't be where we are right now won't we?

What are your views.

P.s. The email circulated was with respect to corruption and India, are they any other email circulated in other regions?

Comments

Popular Post

The unofficial guide to become a Certified Salesforce Administrator (ADM 201)

In my attempt at maximum certifications in 60 days, I completed Salesforce Certified Administrator exam on February 11th 2013 So you have decided to ramp up your career and take certifications in your hand. Good choice. It is also likely that this is the first time you have heard of Salesforce, certification and since your company has a vision of you completing the certification you have decided to do it. At this stage it is likely that, You have done extensive googling. You have received countless brain-dumps. And you have received plenty of advise from different types of users which ranges from Admin certification is easier than making coffee to Admin certification is tougher than building a rocket-ship to fly off to the moon. The purpose of this guide is to give you a clear understanding of what to expect when you are expected to become Certified Salesforce Administrator. To bring sense to all the things you have seen so far and to clearly explain what to do and what

Some PDF tricks on Visualforce: Landscape, A4, page number and more

The beauty of Visualforce is simplicity. Remember the shock you received when you were told the entire page renders as PDF if you just add renderAs=PDF to the Page tag. For those who thought I spoke alien language right now, here is the trick, to render a page as PDF, we add a simple attribute to the <apex: page> tag <apex: page renderAs='pdf'> This will render the entire page as PDF. Now, say we need to add some extra features to the PDF. Like a page number in the footer or we need to render the page in landscape mode. Faced with this problem, I put on my Indiana Jones hat and went hunting for it in the vast hay-sack of the internet (read: googled extensively). Imagine my happiness when i found a big big page with many big big examples to solve the problem. The document I am referring to is from W3C, paged Box media . Long story short, I now possess the ultimate secret of rendering the page in any format I want. So here are few tricks I learned from the p

The Basics of writing a Apex Trigger

One of the most important and common asked question on Forums and everywhere is how do I write a trigger. Coding in Apex Trigger is like going to a dentist for a root canal, you keep dreading the moment until you realize it is actually not going to hurt you. If you plan to write an Apex Trigger this quick guide will help you doing so. The first and foremost rule in writing a trigger is to remember the oldest suggestion given to the most comprehensive Hitchhikers Guide to Galaxy, ' Don't Panic. ' Writing a trigger is not a rocket science, in-fact we should thank the team at Salesforce and ForceDotCom for making everything so simple, that anyone can do it. Enough of talk, lets code. So you want to write a trigger. Let us have a glimpse of what we are going to build. The problem statement is as follows Problem:  When the User is entering the Opportunity, check for the Opportunity Amount. If the Opportunity Amount is greater than 50,000. Mark the Parent Account as