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Valleywag
Rapleaf, the personal reputation database backed by Peter Thiel and founded by champion Valley networker Auren Hoffman, makes the following pitch: By creating an account, you create a reputation for yourself. Hoffman is ideally qualified to run this particular venture: he's an expert in the manufacturing of online history. For instance, you must have been imagining his involvement with sleazier hangers-on of a lame-duck Republican administration.
We've already exposed how MLK Hamilton, an online alter ego named foolishly after two of the Valley schmoozer's heroes, has been guarding Hoffman's Wikipedia entry. After someone else remarked on the coincidence, suspecting they were one and the same, an anonymous Wikipedia contributor edited out the reference.
There's no way to prove that was, again, Hoffman himself. But it is amusing that a user with the same I.P. address is also erasing records of Hoffman's increasingly embarrassing involvement with the Republican party. He is, writes Hoffman's shadowy protector, not an adviser to the well-connected public relations firm that took Pentagon money to bribe Iraqi journalists.
"Hoffman's San Francisco loft is decorated with pictures of prominent Rebublican politicians," Wikipedia once claimed. That was deleted, by the same anonymous user, on the grounds that it was not verifiable. Because, of course, the Wikipedia schemer had nothing to do with Hoffman, someone else entirely, and therefore could not possibly know his taste in apartment decor.
