Some guys who have spent enough time in Shanghai to take a photo and buy some pirate DVDs have started a fake company and hoax blog, called Blog Oriented.

Their fake business model is to train a bunch of Chinese people to write like American bloggers, and develop a massive stable of popular websites that pretend to be personal blogs. They would make their money by charging clients for 'astroturfing' which means producing a fake grass roots movement for political or marketing ends. In other words, a client who wanted to promote a product would pay the company to have the product mentioned on their blogs.

There are some funny details about the business on the hoax blog:

Rather than just providing our writers with our list of hot topics we are also going to inundate them over the next few weeks with as much Western material as possible. Thanks to the abundance of cheap DVDs available in China we have essentially limitless source material. Our Western inundation will be split into Phase 1 & 2. Phase 1 will entail showing television shows during lunch and hosting nightly film-festivals with free American junk food. Jeff's CDs will also be played nonstop in the office. The goal of Phase 1 is to create a general backlog of knowledge for our authors to draw upon.

Phase 2 will be our effort to create a 'cultural caste' in the office in hopes of forming a microcosm of American society. The plan is to isolate the different blog groups from each other for a few weeks and during this time show each group specific material normally associated with the types of blogs they will be writing. We hope that the isolation will allow the groups to generate antipathy for each other and certain areas of American culture. The long term applications for this writer segmentation are endless. If actual disdain is developed between teams of writers than they may independantly bash each other on their blogs. Any sort of blog to blog interaction will make our blog library that much more realistic.

What if is this thing is not a hoax?

If that's the case, the misguided souls behind it will soon go insane as they try to train their Chinese staff to perfectly mimic the language and culture of American youths without leaving Shanghai, watching American TV or listening to American radio. Pirate DVDs can only get you so far.