In a recent post enciphered discussed political Google bombing. As introduced in class, Google bombing refers to the practice of linking multiple sites and blogs to a certain page in order to boost its ranking in the Google search results. Some of the most famous Google bombs are expressions of political opinion.

One instance of Google Bombing occurred during the 2006 election cycle, which targeted fifty or so Republican candidates. As a response, Google announced that it would adjust its search algorithm in an attempt to minimize the impact of Google bombing.

On a related note, a post by Princess Felicia Octavia Gabrielle del Granditois discusses how the politicians can take advantage of the Google Adwords. As the 2008 presidential campaign gets rolling, Google has realized the potential profit to be made by selling campaign advertisement and is aggressively reaching out to campaigners. Today, a Google search for “election 2008″ brings up the sponsored link to Barack Obama’s campaign website.

A post by theironman728 discusses an interesting study that used advanced brain-scanning technology to cast light on social conformity. In a famous series of laboratory experiments from the 1950’s by social psychologist Dr. Solomon Asch, people gave wrong answers to questions not just because they wanted to conform social pressure, but because the social pressure actually changed their perceptions. Dr. Dan Ariely, a professor of management and decision making at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pointed out that the study “suggests that information from other people may color our perception at a very deep level.”

A post by mrjack discussed the information cascade effect in the US intelligence community. The hierarchical structure of intelligence can exacerbate the effect because subordinates often feel pressured to their superiors what they want to hear. Both Blanche Dubois and hmmm wrote posts discussing Ian Cooper’s blog article Jumping on the Bandwagon Effect, which addresses the bandwagon effect in financial markets. A few investors may begin buying a stock on some positive news. Assuming these early buyers are trading on their private information, other investors may start buying as well. Soon everyone is “jumping on the bandwagon” to take a piece of the profit pie, thus causing the stock price to skyrocket. But just as quickly as it rose, the price plummets without warning as early investors dump their shares. With this knowledge about the behavior and buying trends of investors, one can try to profit from trading on the bandwagon effect by staying one step ahead of the market.