Poseur Alert

I think I spotted a poseur jumping on the energy infohighway. This site EnergyDigger.com reeks of snake oil.

This testimonial I found pretty funny actually:

"Every morning after my bath, I sit in front of the computer with my toys and look at ENERGYDIGGER. The name is so erotic. I don't know what it means but it makes me feel smart and sexy. It looks pretty."
Candie Plastique, stripper (Atlanta, Georgia)

I got tipped off originally by one of the apparent proprietors of the site who tried to hijack the long-running Michael Lynch thread at the PeakOil.com message board.

thanks - I hope some people join it and make a little discussion there - it is a new site and there are only a handfull of people there - there may not be any great discussions there for a while till people get to know where the site is... thanks for joining - get the ball to rolling by placing a few comments out on the boards and maybe some people will chime in on the forums at EnergyDigger.com ... the main thrust of the site was to generate the best oil and gas news from around the world - I wrote the aolgorithms¹ to scour the globe of hundreds of newspapers to gather the most relevant news in the energy industry - it is working quite wll actually.

I have no problems spotting a fake polyglot. Elsewhere the guy claims years of experience as a drilling supervisor. No way does this dude come up with any "algorithms" when you just need to configure a freeware news aggregator; especially when you claim to have spent most of your professional life working at oil drilling sites.

Sorry, but us oil depletionists and energy worry-warts happen to have spines made of primarily cynical materials.

Update: Another quote from the EnergyDigger:

The fact the Dick Cheney ran Halliburton doesn't make him a bad guy, it makes him experienced and provides a grounded base of understanding of the problems we are facing. I have met him personally and worked for him as well - he is a level headed and competant person whom I would say understands the situation very well.

He met Cheney and lived to tell about it. Quite an achievement. I have always wondered how a politician's approval rating can go up after shooting a man at close range in the face. But then again, when you have that low an approval rating (15%-20%), and shooting a man gets a rise out of the manly 25% of the population, you can see why it turned out as a good political move.

Update 2: A Commenter said "Maybe not, but the shareholders during Cheney's reign as CEO have recently revived a class action suit alleging fraudulent behaviour under Cheney. The lead lawyer is just finishing a long on-going case which has prevented him from focusing on Cheney. Don't have the link but it will be in the press very soon."

For the cynical among us, that testimonial should really give us grounds for dismissing everything EnergyDigger says. Are Cheney and BushCo really "good guys" in our nation's path forward?

If EnergyDigger really knew Cheney and claims to have worked for him, he should start spilling all the beans he can on Cheney, like what lies within the "Secret Energy Plan" that Cheney worked on with executives from Enron and elsewhere. Now that would serve as a good web site starter theme -- much, much better than creating some rinky-dink news aggregator that no one in their right mind should be impressed with.

I taught engineering level programming at a major university in the 80's and your foolish comments should not go unchallenged - this is custom coded algorythems that collect, score and distinguish between different stories across many news XML services around the globe - it even deletes duplicate news storys about the same topic that ultimately appear in different news feeds daily so there are never 2 stories on the same issue - the fuzzy logic algorythems² are not unlike the search engines news services that throw out duplicate stories that appear on the same story in different news feeds...totally automated.

GIGO : Garbage In leads to Garbage Out

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¹"aolgorithms" -- The marketing idea behind CD's that get delivered weekly to your mailbox, offering up subscription to a dying email service.
²"algorythems" -- The reason that our former Vice President seemed so wooden. He lacked this vital soulful trait.