False Positives on Gawker Stalker

Both Joseph Clarke, in the comments to my Gawker Stalker piece, and Andrew Krucoff, today, make the good point that the evil nature of Gawker Stalker can be allayed by celebrities (or anybody else) reporting false sightings. Indeed, false sightings could be a whole new art form: imagine a series of sightings of John Travolta, say, doing increasingly improbable things in increasingly improbable places – but all in a manner which is consistent in terms of the fictional celebrity being able to get from one fictional sighting to the next in time.

I'm sure that Nick Denton doesn't care in the slightest if people report false sightings, so long as the feature becomes/remains popular. In fact, insofar as the popularity of Gawker Stalker is a function of the number of sightings reported, Denton might even like the fictional ones: there's no such thing as a bad datapoint, if all datapoints, at the margin, drive traffic.

I'm just not sure who we're meant to rely on to submit the false sightings. It's a fun joke for Krucoff for one day, but he's not going to do it day in and day out – and I doubt the celebrities and their minions are going to want to come up with such things day after day, month after month, either. Still, if you're ever feeling bored at work, go ahead and give Gawker something fictional. It'll throw some noise into the Stalker Database, and will probably help pay Denton's ~~hamsters~~ interns as well.

Posted by Felix at 20:55 EST