Intel Employee Caught Running OLPC News Site

An anonymous reader noted yet another story about credibility and disclosure on-line. An OLPC news site highly critical of the project was run by an Intel employee who actually is working on a project that competes with the OLPC. Oh, and the site failed to disclose this pretty serious bit of bias. The article talks about the most extreme interpretation ("Intel secretly bankrolls blog that disses competitor") but even the less extreme version ("insider badmouths competitors anonymously at night") is pretty fishy. Just more reasons to never believe anything on-line, including me I guess.

Comments

The defense from the astroturfer is sad.

[UberOogie]

Wayan seems to be replying to every article about this.

His argument seems to be:
It is a coincidence that he is working on a competing product to the OLPC.
It is a coincidence that he started a "personal" project slandering his business rival and getting Google links to the OLPC.
It is simply standard procedure that he is buying negative Google ads to promote his personal site. (You know, the way you buy Google Ads all the time for your personal projects.)

His screeching denials are more damning than anything else.

And

[Joe Jay Bee]

Slashdot, with its numerous Microsoft bashing and Linux praising articles, is owned by OSTG (or SourceForge, whatever it's called) which has everything to gain from, er, the promotion of Linux and F/OSS.

So, where's the full disclosure on this, hum?

Re:I am going to go out on a limb here

[burnin1965]

this blog never really had that big of a following

If it doesn't have much of a following its probably due to the obvious bias of the site. I don't recall the first time I read olpc news and how I got there but it was obvious from the start that it wasn't really an olpc news site but rather was simply an attack site spreading the same disinformation we see posted to message boards.

The olpc news blog attacked the educational objectives of the project from the start, not by critically assessing the years of research and study that went into the plan rather, by completely ignoring not just the research and study but even the advertised objectives and methods written in plain english on the loptop.org web site. How many times does it have to be explained to these people that its not a laptop project dumping laptops on starving third world children, its about the educational concept of constructionism.

It even continues to this day where he posts "news" that there is no news showing that the kids who have so far received laptops are learning when again if he has been following the real news, you know, journalists and reporters actually out in the field finding out for themselves, the educational benefits are beginning to demonstrate themselves in small ways just as they did in the research.

And even if the blog is not closely followed, this guy is being interviewed and quoted all over the radio, even by NPR, as a source for OLPC news. That would be news about OLPC, not the website olpcnews which is a misnomer. Its disgraceful. Even though I stopped reading the guys web site I still had to listen to his crap on the radio when ever the OLPC project comes up in the real news.

Even though there is an obvious conflict of interest, and his site seems to be very biased, I can still see the possibility that he was just creating a blog about something he was interested in. I don't believe that the XO and Classmate were originally competing products as the target kids and communities for the OLPC educational program were outside the realm of Intel's existing educational assistance programs. The problem is that marketing PR, and in the case of Microsoft politics concerning open source software, drove them to "compete" in the OLPC "market" when in fact there is no market, its a charitable non-profit cause. As things were getting ugly in the media between Intel and OLPC he really should have disclosed the conflict of interest that arose.

You want *negative*????

[thatseattleguy]

I frequent that site. I actually find most of Wayan Vota's postings about the OLPC to be neutral or positive (with other contributors all over the map).

Jeesh, go visit right now. The lead article's titled "10,000 Give One Get One XO Laptops Going to OLPC Mongolia". Hardly the stuff of astroturfing.

You really want _negative_? Go visit their forums (same site) and read the posts from the hundreds of "Give One Get One" donors who've been out $423.95 for over two months now and still have no XO laptops to show for it, due to OLPC's incompetency and inability to manage the program. _That's_ negative stuff.

Full disclosure: I'm one of those unfortunate donors.

/tsg/