In case you're living under a rock, Sony has been caught red-handed doing something few are aware has become hugely common: authoring a flog. Once discovered, Sony took it down as fast as they were able - but Consumerist has gratefully reposted their mirror of the PSP flog at http://www.alliwantforxmasisapspflog.com/.
A flog is a blog written as a marketing tool; like astroturfing (a "fake grassroots" campaign is probably the best description), a flog has a specific purpose: To pretend to be one or more people writing a blog out of pure enjoyment or enlightened self-interest, when in reality the whole blog is a sham/shill/marketing exercise. The person may be real, but usually isn't; and everything you see has been craftily worked over and written.
This isn't like Major Nelson's blog, or any of the other Microsoft blogs - they're not claiming to be anything other than a bunch of Microsoft bloggers. Sure, they're astroturfing in their own little ways, and their high-profile blogs are just as carefully managed, but they're putting people like Larry Hryb out on the line to air dirty laundry with. They're real people, with all of the good and bad that entails.
This? This is flogging at its best. Consumerist put it in third place, behind McDonalds' surreptitious 4Railroads and Mcdmillionwinner flogs and Walmart's covert Walmarting Across America sites.
This works, folks. It works an awful lot better than people think; everyone's gotten pretty used to YouTube's high-quality of content, and forget that a lot of it can be carefully engineered by one organisation or another to create huge astroturf events and generate buzz for products.
