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Here is an interesting article from The Sunday Times (January 28, 2007) regarding shill bidding on eBay.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2570050.html
Augh. Who edited that? Bidded is not a word! Bidded is not the past tense of bid. You say “I have bid, I do bid, I am bidding.” Gah. Bidded isn’t even in the dictionary, how did this get past spell-check?
*ahem* Sorry, my grammar nazi got away from me.
😆 😆 😆 That’s okay, SPark. It’s good to see people who still notice proper spelling – or lack thereof.
I don’t care if people murder English in chatrooms and on forums, but if you’re going to publish it, you should at least run it through a proper spell-check first!
Can’t people check account name and computer er…what do you call those things…each computer has an IP address…can you determine if the seller is driving up the bids that way? That…or maybe they have multiple computers or friends…either way I don’t know how you could proove and/or stop them.
eBay supposedly has software in place to catch shill bidders. I asked Snap in another thread what he thought the effectiveness of that kind of software would be, but he never answered. He hasn’t been around, so maybe he hasn’t seen the post.
Yes, ebay could probably check IPs.
But ebay only employs a handful of people to keep track of this kind of thing, and there are millions of auctions every day. Somehow I doubt they’re checking up on most of them… And even checking IPs doesn’t help, because a lot of shill bidders are friends or family of the seller, using a different computer.
SPark wrote:Augh. Who edited that? Bidded is not a word! Bidded is not the past tense of bid. You say “I have bid, I do bid, I am bidding.” Gah. Bidded isn’t even in the dictionary, how did this get past spell-check?
*ahem* Sorry, my grammar nazi got away from me.
Actually I have totally gotten frustrated with the state of publishing right now. They depend on spell check which does not catch a missing word or if a word is mis-spelled into a new word. There was one sentence in a book I had to read 5 times to figure out what it meant – I finally realized they had left a word out. But the cost of books keeps going up while the quality of editing continues to go down.
Ok, that was my pet peeve for the day…
I must say, MS Word’s spell check isn’t perfect and sometimes it makes pretty stupid suggestions for corrections, but it does catch a lot. If authors would give their books to a friend to read, 99% of the grammar errors could be avoided. In my writings I miss a lot of misspelled or missing words because I know how the sentence is supposed to run and my mind fills in the blanks automatically. But when Mom or Grandma reads them, they catch the errors. It doesn’t speak well of people’s efforts when they let bad grammar get in.
Another thing that would help in the publiching industry would be to print out hard copies of the thing you need to edit. I used to work at a newspaper on the copy desk (building and editing news pages) and I know we always caught more things when we were able to print the page/story out versus editing it on the screen.
One of the first things I always did when I got something was to run spell check, but spell check is only as smart as the person who entered the words. If you have to add a word to spell check you better make sure it is spelled right or it will change the word to the one the program thinks is correct every time.
A large part of my job is technical writing and I agree that it’s easier to catch typo’s, grammatical errors, incorrect word choices (i.e. there instead of their) when looking at a hard copy. For some reason they just don’t show up as easily in the electronic copy. I also think spell check is great for a preliminary review, but it is rather limited.
I agree. I always teach my students to see why Word underlined something, but they have to decide for themselves if it is correct. I tell them to buy a dictionary and have it next to them when they are writing. That way they can look up the word Word suggests (if they aren’t sure of the meaning) and change it accordingly. They also have a grammar handbook that would help too.
But mostly, I’m trying to teach them the difference between “there,” “their,” and “they’re” and other homophomes so they just know what is right. Yes, these are college students.
starbreeze wrote:I agree that it’s easier to catch typo’s, grammatical errors, incorrect word choices (i.e. there instead of their) when looking at a hard copy. For some reason they just don’t show up as easily in the electronic copy.
I’ve noticed the same thing. I always print out formal documents for a final final review before sending them out.
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