At first it didn’t seem suspicious: a comment by someone named Suzan Loughney to one of our posts about the Kindle. Wrote Loughney,

I like reading and at the beginning I did miss a bit on the feeling of reading books. But now I love to hold the Kindle, the e-ink seems to work very well, it is really like reading books! Now I often read with the Kindle for several hours but I don’t feel tired! And I now prefer to manage all books inside the Kindle rather than my never big enough bookshelf! And like to do bookmarking, annotation, dictionary lookup without any additional thing but a Kindle.

I mean, it was a bit warm and fuzzy for a gizmo, rather exhaustive in its checklist description and rather odd in its phrasing, and “Suzan” was spelled funny. Plus, it didn’t really address what our post was about — it reported that Amazon had released software so that you can read Kindle books on your PC, and we wondered if anyone really wanted to read ebooks on their desktop. It wasn’t really critical of the Kindle, but it did have a headline that might have made it seem so: “Kindle for PC: Who cares?” Still, “Suzan” was vaguely on topic and seemed sincere and not everyone who writes in is a genius. And so I was just about to press the “approve” button for her message when I noticed another comment extolling the Kindle that had come in moments earlier from Kendall Puddephatt.

Okay, now that was a, er, notable name, and it was another message rather wide of the mark, oddly thoughtful and overheated as it extolled a checklist of the supposed virtues of the Kindle in response to a post that had a headline seemingly critical of the device — “Something you won’t get from a Kindle“:

It might be useful at school – say you need to read “Great Expectations” for a class. With your Kindle, you can highlight and “clip” passages, make your own annotations in the text, and go online to do research. Plus, the book itself is FREE in the Kindle store.

And there were more such comments — Sergio Rodenbough wrote in, and so did Cherri Karlinsky — and they were all kind of similarly scary-hot for the Kindle.

And then there was this comment from Piper Stockton: “I like reading and at the beginning I did miss a bit on the feeling of reading books. But now I love to hold the Kindle, the e-ink seems to work very well, it is really like reading books!”

All of the messages came in within minutes of each other, although they all cited different authors, gave different email addresses, and came from different IP addresses. But there was one notable thing beyond their similarity: they all cited the same url.

Who knows why someone would go through such a laborious effort and then flag their fakery for me like that. More important is the evidence this provides that Amazon, as I have suspected all along, either fosters or more likely employs astroturfers — that is, people to conduct a fake grass-roots campaign in support of the company and its products and tactics.

And here’s the question: If Amazon goes to such lengths to plant disinformation at little ole MobyLives, can you imagine the scale of their efforts to misinform bigger, more influential media?

Let us know if your blog has been subjected to something similar.