Originally published at Lemmingworks. You can comment here or there.
Slashdot | 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.
This site, One Laptop Per Child News, is one that I read and use the forum of. To be honest, I’m not a fanatic for any side or technology. OLPC ‘did it’ and should always get cred for that. Someone may do it better. To be honest, I’ll always support open initiatives over closed ones.
Here’s some more info:
Silicon Valley Sleuth: OLPC blog draws fire for failure to disclose
So it doesn’t take too much of a conspiracy theorist to believe that Intel is secretly bankrolling the OLPC-News website.
Adding insult to injury, OLPC-News is buying advertising on Google to attract visitors to its website.
OLPC News denies all the accusations, but fact is that the site has a huge conflict of interest that it conveniently failed to disclose.
