As a fan of James Bond movies, I decided to visit the official Ian Fleming website where I learned that Mr. Fleming had a passion for collecting first edition books and original technical manuscripts, and that he had donated his literary collection to the Lilly Library at Indiana University. I proceeded to the Indiana University website to investigate further when I came across a news item on its homepage announcing that IU researchers had created a data mining website in pursuit of political astroturfers and were enjoying some success. So, I checked it out. The article's first half deals with the mechanics of their approach "to root out Twitter-based political astroturfing campaigns," and was interesting enough. The second half presents their findings. I was a little unnerved when the first example detailed possible GOP use of the techniques and implied John Boehner's involvement with their only evidence being that his name was mentioned in the tweets. I was incensed by...(Read Full Post)