So I get email from The Times newspaper and click the link at the bottom of the email to unsubscribe.
This takes me to the Times website where a message says “BULLETIN UNSUBSCRIBE, User subscription do not exist for the bulletin.”
OK - you guess! What’s that all about?
My wife has never been a huge fan of the web - she’d much rather be painting, practicing yoga or maybe out walking in the Peak District. But recently she has had a dabble with a little website for women.
All was OK until I did a quick dupe content check at Google and found the entire site ripped off completely - word for word by someone apparently in India - with Adsense on it, of course.
So… she went nuts! lol - and after disuading her from running up a bill with our solicitor she has come to accept this sort of “wild west” behaviour and, like me, she’s just putting it down to experience… after contacting the bad guy/gal’s host and preparing a DMCA, etc etc.
Welcome to the web, Mrs SES 
A story in the Guardian today about how the BBC website is £36m over budget.
It’s worth it!
End of.
How are the mighty fallen…
The darling of the VOIP industry just took a major hit as a result of being pretty much screwed for two days.
Now all websites and online services have problems from time to time, but two days without Skype really caused me some grief. Along with Messenger (no voice support for Macs) I use Skype extensively to discuss everything from client work, to personal conversation and collaborative online meetings. In fact I have one client who is creating a new online business who’s communications system is based on Skype - I don’t think that will an option now.
A few hours downtime can soon be forgotten - but two days of no communications is unacceptable!
Must do better…
Back in the late 1990s when Google was just an idea in two young men’s minds, we in the search engine optimisation industry were making our living positioning our clients with the likes of AltaVista, Lycos, etc. And when Google appeared on the scene we were seriously impressed - we became instant fans because the relevance of the results was so good - when you searched for blue widgets you got a serp of blue widgets. But now in the days of Google Earth, Maps, Video etc etc I have to ask whether Google, as regards being a search engine, has taken its eye off the ball?
For instance, this morning one of the extractor fans in our office died, so I searched Google to see if we could still get that particular model so the refitting would be easy. I typed in the following search phrase - Marley extractor fan - and got this -
1st result was www.propertyfinder.com - the page was a house for sale with a Marley fan fitted in the loo - 2nd and 3rd results were ebay, the next three results were houses for sale, result number seven was a comparrison shopping site, eight and nine were property sales sites again and number ten was a BBC news item about drugs in the UK that mentioned Bob Marley…
Click here
Couldn’t sleep last night - this Yahoo! cloaking thing was on my mind - will Google punish me for linking to a “bad neighbourhood”? 
Anyone working within the search engine optimisation industry must surely take notice of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, this is where the search giant lays down the law on what is acceptable and what is unacceptable and mentions two things in particular that are relevant to this situation:
1) “avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods”
2) “Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.”
This definately makes Yahoo! a bad neighborhood - and I linked to it! Bugger!
I’ve always thought that linking to relevant sections of the major search engines, Wikipedia and the Open Directory Project helped my readers more clearly understand the backdrop against which we work and showed us working in the spirit of the web - err, I was wrong…
Funnily enough, I remember a similar situation a few years ago when Microsoft was also caught with its pants down. The pages are long gone now, but the incident is still well documented on a few of the search engine forums, like cre8asiteforums, webproworld.com and ihelpyou. Oops! I’ve given Dougie a link - will that come back one day to bite me on the bum? 
I must like living dangerously - linking to these bad neighborhoods - maybe I’ll take up bull riding as a new career
I’ve been following a story over at Threadwatch about the US authorities banning troops from using websites like YouTube and MySpace in what appears to be an attempt to censor videos etc depicting real life on the ground.
This quote from the article caught my eye - “The U.S. Army’s not going to pay the bill for you to get on MySpace and YouTube,” said Maj. Bruce Mumford, of Chester, Neb., who is serving as the brigade communications officer for the 4th Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, in Iraq.
Meaning, we expect you to lay down your life for this (unjust) cause but you cannot do anything that would compromise our propaganda?
Aaron, the main man over there also adds this quote from the BBC News website:
“The US military has taken the war in Iraq into cyberspace, with the launch of its own channel on the video-sharing website YouTube.
Its 25 brief clips include footage of US soldiers firing at unseen snipers in Baghdad, handing out footballs to Iraqi children and rescuing an Iraqi family injured by an explosive device. ”
Shortly after reading all this I saw on the Guardian website the news item that Prince Harry will not be going. Remembering the street interviews by Michael Moore in his Fahrenheit 911 documentary asking American politicians about their kids going to fight, I was struck once again with the overwhelming hypocrisy of the current American right.
A victory by the head of the British Army General Sir Richard Dannatt for common sense! Now, let’s make the final leap of faith and bring the troops home now.
</RANT>
Threadwatch story here
Original article here
BBC news article here
Guardian article here
Return
to
Search
Engine Serious
