Even though my spam filters seem to block all lottery scams these days, my readers still receive them. Here’s one from The Holland Casino Lotto Promo Int, submitted to me through the comment system, by Georg Pétur from Island. I’ve obfuscated the email addresses somewhat since I didn’t receive this one myself. Read the rest of this entry »
TradeDoubler, the pan-european affiliate-network, now introduces a pay-per-call service called td Talk. The service is ideal for more advertising more complex products than those that might be sold without any human interaction what so ever.
In high-value areas such as finance or travel, many customers want to talk to a human, rather than just placing an order right after clicking through from an ad or link on an affiliated website. A pay-per-call network such as td Talk delivers improved revenues for website publishers, supplying a way to easily promote more complex and high value products online for major advertisers. The website owner receives a commission for all the traffic you generate, whether it becomes a phone call, click or online sale.
First there was the cookie
I think the first step towards td Talk was when TradeDoubler realised that quite few site owners where willing publish this kind of high-value advertisements because of the lower lead rate compared to the click-through rate. TradeDoubler was one of the first affiliate networks to implement a cookie time with clicks, thus making it possible for website owners to receive a commission even when a potential customer would need time before make the purchase.
For the Swedish market, I’m quite convinced that TradeDoublers new service will be very successful in areas such as computers, mortgage loans, and travel.
Read more about TradeDoublers new service td Talk at
www.tradedoubler.com/pan/cms/products/products_publishers/prod_publ_td_talk
Well, at least not according to Google.
For more than two years now, the CV page for George W Bush has been ranking in the top position when somebody searched for the two words [miserable failure]. No more though. The reason why it ranked up there was that a few hundred thousand web pages had a link with the two words linked to the page. That was enough for it to achieve this not too flattering first position in Google’s result pages. The phenonemon even has a name. The Google Bomb.
According to Google the change is not manual, but totally algoritmic, and this really makes it interesting for SEO specialist who advocate an on-site technique for search engine optimization.
I cannot be 100% sure (nobody can but a small team lead by Matt Cutts), but I’m pretty confident that Google has changed their algoritm in a way that makes everyday life much harder for search engine spammers. I think that the change in the algo consists of these two significant changes:
If I’m right, then Google has taken a really big step forward in it’s fight with search engine spammers of all kinds. Also, it strengthen the kind of SEO that I, and many white hat SEO’s with me, advocate, i.e. that the most important keywords should be prominant in a page, and that the site should have a good, text based link strukture with the most prominent key phrases as linked text.
Read more about Google’s algo change at Searchengineland.com
See also:
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/
www.mattcutts.com/blog/algorithm-to-reduce-googlebomb-impact/
It has actually been quite some time since I last received a lottery scam in my mail box. It’s not as if a miss them, but I must admit that the iScam section of this site could use some updates.
Either, the scammers have become smarter and now filter out my email address form their send lists, or my spam filters have become more intelligent and now filter out the scams. I use a double system with server filtering that takes out the really obvious stuff and just trash it instead of sending it on to me. Then Apple’s Mail.app filters out the spam that actually reaches my computer in a some times too efficient way. Its great, and even though I have used some email addresses for 10 years, I don’t see much spam.
So for a while I have thought that the lottery scammers and 419ers had given up. Until I started moving all those old pages about them into this blog that is. I’m actually overwhelmed by all the comments I’m getting.
Now, several people have reported that they’ve also recieved actual letters (you know, the kind with text written on paper, that come in envelopes with stamps on them). This is totally inline with my theory that email is a dying form of communication.
In January I’ve only seen two Swedish phishing attempts against Nordea, and the occational PayPal phishing.
Then again. Other people, tha lack my level of spam filtering, still get the scam mails. Maybe I’ll just have to turn the filter knobs down a bit again to get some entertainment?
I’m slowly but surely moving old content from the KitSiPub published version of this site into my blogs. Stuff written in English, with an interest for a broader public than swedes will go here, to Nikke’s Index, while texts written in Swedish will end up in the Swedish blog (Nikke Index).
Simple enough. But I also have to figure out what to do with the really old articles, discussing old websites that don’t even exist any more… I just found one text from 2002 discussing the ping services at Blogdex, Popdex and DayPop… How many remember Blogdex today? Is it interesting enough to keep? My sentimental side tells me to save it, my historian-within agrees.
So what about the old Bush jokes? Are they interesting enough to keep.
Decisions, decisions…
We’re accustomed to everyting on the web bein “just a few mouse clicks away”. The click had grown into a natural habit with most of us. Some users (like my mom) just cannot resist double clicking on everything.
But what if the inventors of the mouse, and the early adopters had choosen some other way of interacting with the computer itself?
Dontclick.it is a research project researching alternatives to clicking, and they have a flash site where you can try to navigate just by pointing and moving the mouse about in various ways.
It really feels weird to try not to click things, and I must admit that I eventually did click. It happened when I came to the phase where I wanted to add some feedback. Suddenly I just clicked the field where I was to enter my name. Totally unnessesary of course.
Don’t miss the autopilot where you can see the recordings of other peoples mouse movements. Most peoples recordings look as if they never used the mose before at all.
Try it! www.dontclick.it
In November 2007 i moved most of the old Swedish content on Nikke’s Index into a WordPress blog called Nikke Index. Before that, I boneheadedly refused to refer to my site as a blog. It was a “personal site”, nothing else. But after installing blogs for a few clients, i though it was about time I opened up the site for some social interaction. And I’ve been in love ever since. Most of the features in KitSiPub, my very own CMS suddenly felt very outdated.
This is somewhat the confessions of a Johnny-come-lately blogger. At times it’s almost as being born again.
I haven’t changed my posting habits what so ever (except for refraining from writing in English for a while). But still I’ve gained a lot of new readers. At least readers that I know of, and readers that never would have reacted with mail, that now post comments, and place links that I probably never would have found before. At least not as quickly as when they’r reported via the Technorati ping service.
And now, today when WordPress 2.1 was released, I realised it’s about time I opened up a separate platform for blogging in English again.
Just like before, I won’t keep two language versions of the same content. I’ll stick with writing in English when an international audicence could find some interest in what I’m writing, and stick to Swedish when writing about striktly Swedish affairs.
I’ll also move some, but probably now all, old content into the blog. I’ll start out with moving stuff that hasn’t grown stale and still attracts some interest. And I’ll love to see some comments on all the old scam reports and fake lottery winning notifications I’ve published throughout the years…
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