Ah, the eternal search for buzz! The latest example of a company attempting to use the blogosphere to create buzz for its products has ironically produced a buzz-saw of negative reaction for Nvidia, which apparently hired a bunch of shills to invade gaming forums and post "helpful" mentions of its products.

Check out this and this and this and this, and of course, this, too.

The lesson here? You cannot fool the blogosphere. Sooner or later you're going to get busted.

So if any other companies are thinking of surreptitiously hiring secret word-of-mouth "buzz agents" to shill for them, please bear in mind an axiom that politicians have known for years: the ability to keep a secret is inversely proporional to the number of people involved in your conspiracy.

So if you want to secretly hire one or two shills to plug your products, go ahead. You'll probably get away with it, at least for a while, for all the good those one or two shills will do you.

But hiring 10 or 20?

It's like picking up a gun only to shoot yourself in the foot.