As an Information & Knowledge Management professional, I continuously scan the web for new entrepreneurial start ups presenting innovative ways to manage information. One such start up is BackType which is described by its founders as:
...a conversational search engine. We index and connect millions of conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media so people can find, follow and share comments. BackType was founded in June 2008 by Christopher Golda and Michael Montano.
I signed up for a BackType account last October, filled out my profile, uploaded my information, added a profile picture, etc., I toyed with it for a week or so and then promptly forgot about my account.
It wasn't until I was taking a look at Microsoft's Bing that a Bing search on my name turned up my BackType profile and a preview of the content it contained. I had to make a double take to digest the foul, hate-filled flame rant that appeared in my profile and was attributed to me.
After a quick jump to my long forgotten BackType account, there they were... 100's of comments that were listed on my profile, sporting my profile picture and all. All of them had different user names under my photo and about 40% were not even written in my language. I don't like to think that I am a perfect square, but as a tenured university professor, I don't wish to build up a rep for promoting bestiality with albino squirrels.
It looks like BackType has addressed this issue by providing an option in the user profile to turn on comment moderation and provides email alerts that comments need to be moderated. It looks like a great solution, but I don't recall receiving an email from BackType describing the problem and its solution. I've managed to page through all of the comments one by one and mark all of them as fake (there is no batch utility). I'm not severely peeved, but it would have been cool to discover this sooner.
Update
As you can see from the comment below Christopher Golda offered a quick explanation to the problem. When configuring my BackType account I was asked for the following:
"Include the URLs of the websites you comment with – these are the websites you fill out in the comment form when you write a comment – put each entry on a new line."I incorrectly understood these instructions to mean "Include the URLs of the websites you comment ON --". I included YouTube in the list and instantly created a hard line connection to flame war nirvana. So don't do that. What the instructions are asking for are the URLs I input into any comment form when asked for MY website. BackType crawls the comments automatically and uses this list to attribute comments to me.
Problem solved. I'm happy to be me again. Thanks for the quick comment, Christopher! =]
