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A fake blog, a form of spinning known as a flog or a flack blog, is a social media tool designed to publicize a product or company. As corporate blogs become increasingly popular and effective, certain firms have designed fake blog entries to help promote their clients’ products. The term flog may be applied to corporate or political blogs.

Fake Parody Blogs

One genre of fake blogs is the parody blog; written ostensibly by a celebrity or other noteworthy individual. Unlike other flogs, parody blogs are not necessarily marketing tools. Parody blogs are often written to entertain, confuse, enlighten or to express a point of view through satire and humor. Noteworthy parody blogs include Fake Steve Jobs, Mock Mark Cuban and the network News Groper.

Examples of Parody Blogs

http://whatwouldjb.blogspot.com/

What Would Jesus Blog

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/004143.html

Fake McDonald’s Blog

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/archives/cat_911.html

Fake Alqueda Blog

http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/coke-gets-a-zero-for-effort/2006/01/24/1138066785594.html

REPORTING FAKE BLOGS

According to TimesOnline, the United Kingdom passed a law at the start of 2008. This law aims to identify floggers. Currently the United States does not have any laws in place against flogs, several new programs are now available to help publicize them according to peoplesearchnews.com.

Due to the short length of time that flogs have been around the best action for reporting and recognizing flogs have not been established yet. SplogReporter.com is no longer updated, but still lists several flogs.

Blogger.com is a blogging service owned by Google. Flogs found on the Blogger network can be reported directly to the site.
WordPress is another popular blogging service. If a flog is found on WordPress, users should email the site at mailto:m@wordpress.org with the flog’s web address and why the user feels it should be removed.
CAPTCHA is a source to stop Flogs created by automated systems. According to http://www.captcha.net/ a CAPTCHA is a program that protects web sites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot.

Identifying Real Blogs

In order to give blogs more authenticity Jim Kukral, publisher of ReveNews.com created the Blog Badge of Honor for bloggers to place on their blog. Bloggers placing the badge of honor on their blog agree to the terms laid out on Kukral web site. The terms state the bloggers will not write fake blogs among other stipulations.

Example of legitimate corporate blogs: NewsPR Wiki

Notable Flogs

4Railroads & Mcdmillionwinner, blogs created by "Stanley Smith" and Marcia Schroeder (a real winner in 2004, but who had nothing to do with writing the blog). Both were pulled shortly after being exposed.

Walmarting Across America, written by two Walmart "enthusiasts" who decided to journey across America in an RV and blog about the experience as they visited Walmarts along the way. While the two people actually did travel across America for the purpose of this blog, it was revealed to be paid for by Walmart.^[1]

All I want for Xmas is a PSP, purported to be written by a group of kids who wanted to get a friend's parents to buy him a PSP. Exposed due to the domain registration, as well as a post admitting the blog was fake shortly before the site and all of its contents were pulled down.

· The first example of a corporate flog was in 2003 by the Dr Pepper/7UP Company with its milk-based product Raging Cow.