Ping-Pong Diplomacy
I have a couple of search ‘bots that track the use of “Britannica” and related keywords in the blogosphere. These frequently find “spam blogs” created by a robot to target specific ad-sense or YPN keywords. These fake blogs will crib content from other sites that seem to be related to their keywords, in hopes of drawing context-sensitive text ads that offer high rate of return. Since Britannica covers a broad set of topics, they frequently copy content from EB’s site.
Today I stumbled across one of these spam blogs that targets, of all things, the keyword “ping pong” (yes, as in “table tennis“). A search on google for “ping pong” currently shows nine “Sponsored Links”, so perhaps that is not such a funny idea after all. (I’m not going to link to it, as I don’t want to reward the behavior.)
This particular entry cribbed from an interesting article from the Britannica Student Encyclopedia on Ping-Pong diplomacy: “an episode that occurred in 1971, as the United States was just beginning to restore normal relations with the People’s Republic of China after more than 20 years. As a thaw in relations between the two countries was becoming evident, the Chinese government invited the United States table tennis team […] to visit Beijing and play in exhibition matches. […] The American team lost its exhibition matches […] but the Chinese team was invited to visit the United States. China’s government also allowed American and Canadian newspaper and television reporters into the country to cover the event. Within a year, Nixon himself visited China, and normal diplomatic relations were restored within the decade.”