Technorati's current top search term is "Bush Defrocked". It appears they have become a victim, or perpetrator, of an effort to manipulate people into having a false view of what the public is interested in. There are no blog posts coming up for that search term, no news taking place which would make it a "hot topic", and other blog search engines are not showing results either.

I'm guessing their list of top search terms is based on the number of queries they receive for any given term, rather than the number of posts in their index for a given term. That would make it pretty easy for an external entity to manipulate.

At the time of this posting, these were the other terms:

2. "Web 2.0"
3. Earthquake
4. "Paul Krugman"
5. "David Brooks"
6. "John Tierney"
7. "Grand Challenge"
8. Flock
9. "Leo Laporte"
10. Serenity

Lately, "Impeach Bush" had been one of the top terms. I always though that was kind of strange. That term's absence in the presence of this one leads me to theorize that their entire top term index is being manipulated, and the party behind it just changed the term they push.

But then again, who knows.. Technorati is known to exercise editorial control over their index. Nothing would lead me to believe they do not exercise it elsewhere. A number of popular blogs are omitted from the Top 100 Blogs List, for as best as anyone can tell, "bloggy" political reasons. Slashdot and Scripting News are examples. I'm sure there are more.

I don't really trust Technocrat. Not to mention, they are exactly the type of company I worry about someone buying with a history of using media to manipulate people for political purposes. This "Bush Defrocked" thing is proof that there are people who want to do just that. I'd like to know who is behind it. I worry about situations where things will happen that people can't see coming. Significant manipulation of public perception over specific issues can be carried out with a high degree of subtlety.

This is a good example of some of the issues we have to be concerned about in regard to the design of social web tools. I'll be talking about this stuff at the "Information Warfare for The People" talk at PhreakNIC later this month. There is also a possibility that Industrial Memetics will be sponsoring the hotel's conference TV channel and providing content.

Update: "Bush Defrocked" has disappeared from Technorati's top search terms. Looks like they took notice ..

Technorati top search terms are manipulated