MISCmedia by Clark Humphrey » Blog Archive RANDOM LINKS FOR 8/4/12

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RANDOM LINKS FOR 8/4/12

August 4th, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

visual.ly

According to the “Geek Zodiac,” I belong to the Year of the Astronaut. (I always liked astronauts.)
Forbes.com freelancer Zach Slaton traces the roots of Seattle’s soccer mania back further than the 1974 NASL Sounders, to British and European immigrants who’d come here starting in the 1950s.
A southwest Wash. man was recently discovered attempting to pass some particularly “high quality fake money.” Who says Americans have lost their manufacturing edge?
More than 80 million Facebook accounts are really spambots or other varieties of fake, Facebook management admits.
The Seattle Times (an old-school advertising medium) disses new-school advertising medium Yelp.com. The paper alleges that the “customer review” site promises to promote positive reviews of shops and eateries that buy ads on the site, and threatens to promote negative reviews of those that don’t buy ads on the site.
It’s crop circle time again!
Frank Elaison at Social Media Today would really like Net users to “focus on being positive,” and stop brutally insulting people they’ve never even met.
The Onion (with which the Stranger has a shared pre-history) has found today’s third rail of bad-taste humor.
Back in 2005-2006, a locally-owned small town daily in eastern Idaho (an area more heavily Mormon than Utah) ran an exposÃ© of a boy-abuser within the adult leadership of the local Boy Scouts. The local business and governmental leadership quickly jelled their outspoken supportâ€”not around the victims or their families, but around the Scout leaders who’d conspired to cover up the crimes for years. It’s news now because one of the conspiracy’s most outspoken defenders, the head of the area’s biggest company, is now on Romney’s fundraising team. And he’s doing to Romney’s critics what he did to the newspaper back thenâ€”threaten to sue them into oblivion.