Riya manipulates bloggers?

Arrington's headline is actually very accurate.

You guy's have given a lot of attention to Like.com and, in the past, Riya.com.

Mr. Shah is clearly very good at PR. He has generated a lot of attention and buzz within the geek community to two services (Riya and Like) that don't really work very well. That is the dirty little secret. The buzz is way way better than the service.

Contrast Riya/Like to something like Google or Zappos.com or Digg.com or YouTube. These are companies that *earned* their success by wowing their users. They didn't suck up to reporters and a-list bloggers. They didn't waste precious CEO time on ego-inflating interviews. They didn't blog about their extensive PR efforts. They just worked hard at creating real services that actually solved the problem they were attacking really really well. What they did is way harder and way more impressive than what Mr. Shah does.

Neither Riya nor Like does a particularly good job of solving the problem and yet you guys have given them a ton of free publicity.

Mr. Shah has definitely manipulated you all, but maybe your egos are too big and too fragile to admit it?

Bam: I admit I'm manipulated.

And Digg isn't manipulated? They hired Kevin Rose from TechTV. Why? Because they knew he'd bring his audience (and hype) over to that service.