Your Typos Give Me Gas

You can now get gas -- of the petroleum kind -- by finding typos in Web sites. We found this press release this morning and have no idea if it's a scam, but we were amused.

High Gas Prices, Slashed For Consumers By GasMoneyToolbar.com

Houston, TX (PRWEB) July 10, 2007 -- A new tool to offset high gas prices hits the Internet. A new website (http://www.gasmoneytoolbar.com/), via TypoBounty.com, is taking the sting out of high gas prices for consumers. By allowing consumers to supplement their fuel budgets while helping to correct the Internet, the gas money toolbar is a popular choice for those consumers feeling the pinch of rising gas prices.

Users sign up for a free error hunter account and find and report errors for a shot at money to pay for gas. TypoBounty.com's business is to make the Internet an error free medium for information. To accomplish this goal, TypoBounty brings together a large number of web surfers to help hunt down these errors and report them. Advertisers can gain the benefit of all of the web surfers that converge on TypoBounty.com hunting an opportunity for gas money by finding and reporting Internet errors. (More...)

The first thing we'd like to correct is their headline. No comma is necessary. Even in a headline, subjects and verbs aren't divided by commas. Then, we have two bones to pick with this sentence that comes later in the release:

TypoBounty.com is also an entertaining game for individuals that join the hunt.

1) It's individuals "who" join the hunt, unless the contest is also open to animals, which we doubt.
2) Though it's not ungrammatical, we deplore the use of "individuals" as a synonym for people, and were quite gratified to watch "Idiocracy," a movie about stupid people in the future. The use of individual for person was one sign of idiocy. So don't say we didn't warn you.