The New York Times has written about one recent example of user-generated content gone bad: namely, a video clip of a baby pig “rescuing” a hapless baby goat who is trapped in the pond at a petting zoo. Within hours of the clip being posted to YouTube last fall and subsequently shared on Reddit, it had appeared on The Today Show, NBC’s Nightly News, Good Morning America and dozens of other channels — and why not? It was incredibly cute, and had a feel-good message of the kind that morning shows in particular enjoy.

Of course, the video turned out to be a clip from a new TV show, which the creators manufactured and then uploaded as a kind of viral-marketing ploy. Not only did the baby pig not “rescue” the baby goat, but the producers of the show had to spend hours building an underwater track to even get the pig anywhere near the animal — and in the end they had to use a trained pig, after the one they were originally planning to use showed no intention of going into the pond.

Does it matter whether these clips are real?

As the NYT piece notes, when NBC Nightly News host Brian Williams introduced the video clip, he said he “felt duty bound to share this” with the audience, and added that he didn’t know whether it was real or not. Is that enough of a disclaimer to absolve a media outlet of responsibility for figuring out whether something can be verified or not? Many would argue that it is not. Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute compared it to “a form of malpractice” for journalists (McBride has more on that in a blog post about the incident at Poynter).

@mathewi No. Even though it may seem trivial because it's a pig video, it's embarrassing and adds to distrust of the media.

—
Liz Heron (@lheron) February 27, 2013

Obviously, part of what shows like Good Morning America do is pure entertainment — in other words, not journalism by any stretch. But clips like the baby goat rescue show up on programs like The Nightly News as well, and the hosts rarely say anything about whether a clip is real or not. In some cases, these videos come right after a news report about something serious. How are audiences to know when something is “just entertainment” and therefore hasn’t been checked?

In another recent incident, a video purporting to show a golden eagle snatching a small child from a park went “viral” on the social web and showed up on a number of media outlets. It too turned out to be fake — the creation of some hard-working students in a computer-generated imagery course at a school in Montreal. The students deliberately chose something that seemed almost believable, based on “urban legends” of such incidents in the past.

We need to be careful what we amplify

Interestingly enough, the clip was debunked within hours of being uploaded, by another young programmer with some expertise in computer-generated imaging (as well as by other outlets such as Gawker, which pointed out obvious signs others could have noticed). But as with many corrections in a digital age, it took longer for the truth to propagate than it did the original video — and many of the outlets that shared the original didn’t bother to update their audience with the facts.

Om wrote recently about how one of the key responsibilities of journalists in this new age of “democratized distribution” of information is to pay attention to what they choose to amplify and what they don’t, and incidents like the baby goat video bring that home with a vengeance.

If all a media outlet is doing is sharing the latest video from Reddit or a tweet from a celebrity, how is that adding anything meaningful to what viewers can get elsewhere? It isn’t. And if traditional media continue to imitate their online competitors like BuzzFeed or Reddit without adding anything of value, then they will likely find that audiences are happy to go to the original source of that content rather than relying on the TV news to find it for them.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Donskarpo

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As first pointed out by Frequent Business Traveler, many customers have been fooled into buying one of these through Amazon, believing they just bought an actual iPad case from Apple. And you can’t blame them, based on how the products are presented.

Amazon user “Forest” uploaded this image comparing the fake iPad cover he bought on Amazon to a real Apple iPad cover.

If you search Google for “Apple Smart Cover on Amazon” the first half dozen links (as of today) will take you to an Amazon page that labels these covers “by Apple.” But just below that — in far smaller print — you will read that the orders are sold by another company, often NC Apple Tree or Less Deals, and fulfilled by Amazon. That’s not normally cause for concern — third-party retailers sell other brands’ products to Amazon customers through its affiliate program all the time.

But reading the customer reviews from those who have purchased these covers shows something is amiss. There are several dozen negative reviews that are each a variation on this complaint: “is is a fake! it is not the real apple smart cover! i bought this and i turned out to be just some plastic with magnets on the side that didn’t even fit the iPad 2 and was just a replica.”

The same goes for some of the Smart Cases for sale (the kind that protect the entire iPad, not just the screen), which are fulfilled through Amazon by a company called FantaWare, that also lists the case as “by Apple.” Here’s a sample review from several weeks ago: “This looks sort of like an authentic Apple Smart Case but much thinner. I know because I have one I bought directly from Apple. It came in a box with a clear top, this one arrived in a plastic bag. The liner is also not as soft as the true Apple Product.” There are many more like it.

Here’s how the items are displayed by Amazon:

It specifically says it’s “by Apple,” with a link to a page full of real Apple products that Amazon sells, like iPods, iPhones, MacBooks and more. Only in the small print below “In Stock” does it say it’s sold by a third party.

Based on other feedback, some customers seem aware these are not real Apple Smart Covers and are fine with it. But it’s understandable why many would be confused over whether this was a legitimate Apple product and feel ripped off. Looking back through these reviews, it’s clear this has been going on for some time; some of the negative reviews date back to 2011. Obviously this is an important lesson in reading reviews before ordering something. But it’s also clear that Amazon needs to fix the way the products on its site are labeled.

Amazon didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment on this. I also tried to contact Apple to find out if they even sell real iPad Smart Cases or Covers on Amazon, but did not hear back. My own searches didn’t find any that appear to come direct from Apple.

It’s probably best to follow what an Amazon customer service representative told Jonathan Spira, who described his experience with this in the Frequent Business Traveler blog: “check out these items you wish to order from the Apple store directly to ensure their genuineness.”

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However, former Apple Dashboard developer Todd Ditchendorf’s programmable browser Fake is something genuinely different, a sort of hybrid melding of Safari and Apple’s Automator scripting utility. Fake allows you to drag discrete browser Actions into a graphical Workflow that, once configured, can be saved and run to perform various online tasks automatically.

How it Works and Why It’s Useful

Fake is a useful timesaver, automating tedious tasks like filling out lengthy forms, capturing screenshots, and more. Developers especially can make great use of Fake by graphically configuring automated tests for their web apps.

Fake’s automation features are powered by OS X’s built-in scripting tool AppleScript, so you can incorporate web automation into many OS X scripting tasks.

Fake’s user interface is derivative of the Automator UI, with a side panel containing a library of configurable “actions” that can be employed as an easy alternative to writing AppleScript code from scratch. Tasks available include clicking checkboxes or links, filling out and submitting forms, navigating to URLs, opening and closing browser tabs, and so on.

Sample Workflow

Here’s a simple example of how Fake works. You probably wouldn’t find this particular workflow especially useful unless you’re obsessed with visiting the Apple Store’s iPad pages, but it gets the basic idea across.

You begin with a “Load URL” action, dragging it from the Action Library to the Workflow pane in the Fake UI.

Once your webpage or form appears, you can drag other actions into the workflow pane to navigate, set values and otherwise configure tasks that you point actions to, such as clicking on an element link:

Or clicking an html button:

When you’ve composed the full workflow sequence, click the Run button in the Workflow pane toolbar.

Which will run your automated workflow and take you where you want to go:

This is a simplified example for the sake of clarity. You can do so much more with Fake, but the best way to find out is to get in there and try for yourself. You might also want to check out this screencast at WebWorkerDaily for another example.

A Browser Apart

Fake’s browser component is based on the open source tech used in the OS X Site Specific Browser (SSB) app Fluid. In a nutshell, Fluid technology provides Fake with an array of powerful features that developers like to have in a browser, such as userscript and userstyle support. Fake also taps into Apple’s WebKit to provide element-level analysis of Web pages.

One other difference with Fake is that unlike mainstream Web browsers these days, it’s for-fee demoware, costing $29.95 for a license. However, if browsers are a tool of your livelihood, or you just have better things to do with your time than repeat mundane tasks on the web, Fake could pay for itself pretty quickly. Fake Version 1.4.2 requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later.

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What would you use Fake to automate?

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Fire up Fake and you’re presented with two windows: a browser window, which looks pretty much like a regular Safari window with the addition of a sidebar, and an “Action Library” window (on the right of the screenshot above), which contains all of the tasks you can automate using the app.

The browser window works just as you would expect — you can load web pages, click links, submit forms. The interesting bit is the automation. To automate a task, you just drag actions from the Action Library and place them sequentially in the sidebar. There’s a huge array of things that you can get it to do, from fairly basic actions like loading a particular web page, opening new tabs and taking a screenshot of the page, to more complex stuff like filling out forms and executing JavaScript.

As you drag actions to the sidebar, you’ll see that — depending on the action — you’ll need to fill out certain values. For example, when opening a web page, you’ll need to provide the URL that you’d like to load, and when filling out forms, you’ll need to tell it what field to fill out and what values you’d like to insert.

The sequence of actions can be reordered just by dragging and dropping them in the sidebar, and you can remove actions by deleting them.

Once you’re happy with your sequence, hitting the play button at the top of the sidebar sets Fake in motion.  It runs through your actions in sequence. You can watch its progress in the browser window if you like, or leave it and get on with other things — it plays a ping sound so that you know when it’s done. It allows you to save sequences of actions that you’d like to reuse.

Fake does have some pretty powerful features — you can set up loops and run AppleScript, for example — some of which are probably too complex for non-developers to figure out. But if all you need to do is automate loading up a page, filling out a form or two and perhaps taking a screenshot of the result, its drag-and-drop interface should make it easy enough to use for almost anyone. The sequence shown above took no time at all to put together, for example, and gets Fake to load up the WebWorkerDaily site and take three screenshots, each 60 seconds apart.

Here’s a short demo video showing Fake in action:

Fake 0.2′s currently free to download. However, the site does note that it is a time-limited demo that will expire on August 1. I’m presuming that when it reaches version 1.0, it will become a paid app. As Fake’s not yet finalized there may still be some gremlins to iron out, and it is missing documentation, although the interface is so well-designed you shouldn’t really need it.

What do you use for browser automation?

(via Daring Fireball)

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And, after a bit of investigating, we’ve verified that it indeed wasn’t. The video was a carefully crafted viral ad for Microsoft’s Office suite Project 2007, and the production of the clip involved, among other things, a stuntman, a lot of editing, and a long piece of rope. Read on for more details about the campaign as well as an exclusive snippet of unedited video from the waterslide shoot.

Here’s the back story of the waterslide video in a nutshell –  or at least, what we were supposed to believe: German engineer Bruno Kammerl came up with a special type of neoprene material dubbed Softslide that his web site describes as “almost frictionless.” Kammerl’s goal was to build the longest and most exciting waterslide in the world. He started off with some tests, published videos about it on YouTube, and publicly searched for investors. Then an “influential sponsor” came along and made it possible to test the slide in the German Alps, which led to the video we’ve all seen.

Of course, that’s all bogus. Kammerl’s web site was registered in May by an employee of the German subsidiary of marketing giant MRM Worldwide. Chatter about this connection popped up online only a few days after the waterslide video started to become popular, and MRM Worldwide quickly decided to lift the curtain. Microsoft’s logo was added to Kammerl’s Megawoosh.com web site late last week, and MRM Germany CEO Alexander Ewig finally fessed up to his company’s involvement in a press release emailed to us today, saying: “We developed Megaswoosh as a viral campaign for Microsoft Germany.”

“This revelation was supposed to come a little later,” I was told by Maik Koenigs, whose Hamburg-based viral marketing agency Elbkind was hired by MRM to seed the video onto more than 60 sites. However, bloggers were too quick to make the connection, so there had to be a change of plans. “Viral communication is a dynamic process,” he explained, adding that the outcome was still beyond everyone’s expectations. The campaign was just meant to be for a German audience, but has gotten Twitter, blog and mainstream media responses from all over the world.

So how was the video really done? As some bloggers guessed, it’s a case of creative compositing, meaning that the clip we get to see is based on multiple elements that were combined together to create a final video. A stuntman slides down the slide, secured by a rope. Then there’s a body flying through the air, which is animated. And finally, the big splash. “He actually jumped from a wooden ramp into the pool,” explained Koenigs. Of course, you don’t get to see any of this in the final clip, thanks to careful editing that makes it look like a single take.

Here’s a short, unedited clip that shows how the stuntman filling in for Kammerl is sliding down part of the slide for a first segment of the final video:

So yeah, all you doubters are right: It’s fake. But it’s a pretty elaborate deception, and it certainly looks real enough for a willing suspension of disbelief. Of course, one can debate whether this will really help to sell Microsoft Office, but it’s undoubtedly been a successful viral video.

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