The Consumerist last week posted an item about an outfit called TheCellShop.net and its apparent attempt to buy itself a top-notch reputation on resellerratings.com. The practice is not uncommon on ratings sites, but isn't usually this bald-faced in that TheCellShop wasn't just asking for good grades but 100% perfect ones:

"Dear Valued Customer," it wrote in an e-mail. "If you have purchased from us before and feel we did a good job, please use the link below and rate us 10/10 and we will give you $5 in credit to use for anything on our Web site."

The pitch was even thoughtful enough to walk a customer through the process of fudging an invoice number needed to submit the review if they no longer had theirs handy.

Since The Consumerist didn't mince words in its headline — "TheCellShop.net Caught Bribing Customers To Submit 'Perfect' Reviews" — I figured I should send "Danny" at TheCellShop an e-mail to give him an opportunity to defend himself. Here's his reply:

"We worded the e-mail that was sent out improperly. We wanted to offer $5 coupon to anybody who submitted a review ... we have [acknowledged] the mistake as well on resellerratings.com. We are now offering $5 for anybody who leaves a review whether it be good or bad. … It was our fault for the misworded e-mails."

Convinced? Me neither.

My guess is that it's going to get more reviews and coupon requests than it can handle now ... and not many are going to be giving perfect grades.

YouTube down, everybody panic

It's a quiet Saturday morning at home when my 6-year-old son, Max, scoops his journalist dad: "The LEGO Star Wars videos are broken," he calls from the office as I peck away on my laptop at the kitchen table.

Sure enough, YouTube was down. And before more than an hour had passed, large swaths of the Internet had begun to suffer withdrawal symptoms. Others were clearly starting to freak.

"Seriously, its starting to scare me," wrote one blogger. "If nothing else I need YouTube up tonight to watch Transformers Animated and the next episode of 'From the Drawer.' "

Tin-foil hatters were conjuring up conspiracy theories, one going so far as to suggest that Hillary Clinton's campaign was behind the outage.

Couple hours later, a YouTube spokesman told me via e-mail: "The site was down for about an hour due to internal technical issues. Our engineers quickly assessed and resolved the problem."

Whitepapers

• Advancing the Economics of Networking
• Enterprise Data Center Network Reference Architecture
• Implementing HA at the Enterprise Data Center Edge to Connect to a Large Number of Branch Offices
• File Integrity Monitoring: Secure Your Virtual and Physical IT Environments
• Accelerating a Diverse Mix of Traffic Across the WAN
• Boost Productivity While Cutting Costs with Next-generation Collaboration

View more LANS & WANS whitepapers

Webcasts

• PoE Plus: Impact on the PoE Market
• Creating a high performance workplace with wireless networking
• Harnessing the power of communications to increase workplace performance
• How to cut IT costs with wide-area data services (WDS)
• Making data centers the IT strategic focus
• Protecting assets and employees with IP Video Surveillance

View more LANS & WANS webcasts

Special Reports

• Ethernet Services: WAN options mature
• Keeping Spam at Bay
• Get More From Your WAN
• WAN Optimization: How to rev up sluggish applications
• IP address management in 2008 - six things to know
• Network World Executive Guide: Perfecting Application Performance Management

View more LANS & WANS special reports