Trust Online
August 28, 2007 – 8:54 amTrust on the internet is very thin and online traders like myself without the backing of a huge real life brick-n-mortar establishment spend the whole day building up this trust with every email and communication with our potential buyers with every chance we have.
Not too long ago, though, this chap called Ashwin Khanna, an accomplished tree jumper no less, came along and pull off a trick to shatter the trust that we have built amongst people in the virtual world.
If you are still unaware, Ashwin Khanna ran a blog contest offering a grand prize of $2500 in a lucky draw. i believe many of the entrants participated because we don’t have much to lose except some time and web space but we participated in good faith.
When it was time to announce the winner, Ashwin awarded the prize to a blogger whose blog was new and just started two days before the contest deadline. The very first post was a post to Ashwin’s contest and it was followed by an article copied from the New York Times.
It does not take a genius to make the connection that Ashwin is the winner himself.
Many people are mad at him but they can’t even f@rk him at his blog because he had closed his comments. What they CAN do is to tell the truth about the real Ashwin Khanna and how full of crap he is. And I think this is more harmful than he thought.
I believe that everybody has already pulled out their links to his blog and the immediate effect is a free falling Technorati authority. And even with a boosted Google Page Rank, if his site is already assigned with a Page Rank, he would lose it in the next cycle, if he is not banned by Google yet and taken off the index.
Ashwin Khanna must have been high on drugs to even come up with such a scheme. With such odds against him, it is totally not worth the one or two months of notoriety. A smarter person would have awarded the prize money to a friend with an established blog. At least that would look more respectable, though suspect. But at least it would save his name and preserve whatever rankings that he has achieved.
That’s why it is said that stupidity and genius are only separated by a fine line.
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2 Responses to “Trust Online”
Hey, thanks for the shout-out! Great post.
By Contest Blogger on Aug 28, 2007
Hi Phil,
You are welcome
By Cyberpartygal on Aug 28, 2007