Password & login overload
Have you lost track of all your logins and passwords? I have.
Every free or paid resource needs a login and a password - with the result that most people end up using the same combination all over the place. At least you think you do. Until you come back to log in to, say your domain name control panel (see, I don’t even know the name of the place I’m trying to log in to - what hope is there I’ll remember the login and password??).
Only then does it tell you “incorrect login or password”. Shit. Which? And why? Since I think I used the same ones… didn’t I?
The problem is complicated by the fact that I have several accounts with 123 Reg (I think) and because my browser is holding the last one I signed in with and the site doesn’t have a ’sign in with a different user’ option, the browser never actually logs out so I never actually get to sign in - or try (yawn) - with the ID I think I need. Read more
Is PayPal any good? Not according to this customer feedback
In the online world, if you won’t listen to our feedback, your prospects certainly will.
We’ve always said that blogging critically about a company is usually a deliberate act of punishment for the crime of not listening. I make no apologies for this post being exactly that. I hope it’s picked up by PayPal’s online reputation management people and I hope it’s picked up by people considering whether or not to use PayPal.
It’s not online defamation, its transparency. It’s real, lived experience - customer feedback - that the company won’t listen to.
Email from a family member to EBay dispute department regarding a possible scam on Ebay.
“John,
Thank you for your reply.
What concerns me so much is PayPal is unsafe to use, and impossible to contact. If your bank ignored six emails, two calls wouldn’t you be a little alarmed?
Before the iPhone issue my account was £4 in credit. Now, apparently, after their ill-advised transaction I am £5 in debt - simply outrageous. They not only helped a third party to scam me, they charged ME for the privilege.
I’ve sent SIX emails - how many do you think I should have to send to get a reply? I can’t work on this ‘full-time’, I have to earn a living. I’ve spent a fortune on the telephone, no-one senior was available, the indian call centre operative couldn’t understand me, and the promised ‘call-back’ never came.
These guys are out of control, are going to ruin your business and an unsuitable partner for eBay. I now fully understand the ‘No PayPal’ I see so often.
Please help me to bring them to justice - they are operating beyond any kind of decent business practice. The worst company I have ever dealt with.”
My response to family member:
“I’m currently paying a $5 a month subscription because Pay Pal connected two of my accounts with a supplier to the same record number and I can’t delete it as a result.
I too gave up after weeks of phone calls trying to explain the nuances of the problem to someone in what was, for them, a second language. No response, no solution. In fact, the more I called / emailed, the further I got from a solution until, like you, I just gave up.
Totally unacceptable, totally unaccountable.
Is PayPal any good? Not according to these customers. Family member says eBay seem sympathetic which, I suppose, is good news - considering they own PayPal 
This is another example of what happened to family member, btw (see first story in the thread).
Business directory rip-offs: the Emperor’s Newest Clothes
“If you don’t have anything good to say, then don’t say nuthin’ at all” - Thumper
I’ve had to gag myself tonight.
I’ve seen yet another ‘local online directory’ that’s started up, peddling its wares, inviting people to sign up and advertise their businesses.
The site is a mess. There’s almost nobody signed up on it, and it currently offers no Google visibility to the few who are.
I’m not going to name names, but its one of many. They come in all flavours: online business directories, local ‘portals’, community magazines. They all have one thing in common: they want you to advertise in them, promising increased traffic and Google visibility in return. Some of the big, well-known ones deliver (with varying degrees of success). A lot of smaller, local ones don’t
One such business in this region I’ve heard explicitly offering people increased Google visibility as part of its so called ‘benefits’. I’ve tested its claims backwards and forwards and found that it offers its top paying members NONE.
Another such venture quotes statistics to impress prospects how many people use the internet to buy things - and, of course, to imply that their product offers increased Google visibility. Guess what? It doesn’t.
I’m stopping short of naming these businesses because it’s tantamount to declaring war - and I’m still not sure why it bothers me so much that they do what they do.
In part, it’s because they depend on ignorance to sell their services. But I think the thing that really gets me is that nobody dares announce that the emperor, yet again, is wearing no clothes.
I suspect that if I named those businesses and challenged them, nobody would thank me for doing it. The businesses themselves certainly wouldn’t, nor would the people wasting their money on them. Why? Because they want to believe in an easy fix.
Adwords account phishing scam
If you’ve got an Adwords account, watch out for these dirty phishmongers!
Like most people, I’ve had millions of scam emails in my time. This one (received today) however I think deserves a mention.
Why? Because it combines a number of things together which I think makes it more compelling than many such scams.
1) The email address doesn’t look too suspicious
2) The login address looks right(ish)
but more importantly
3) It capitalises on the fact that Adwords billing IS a complicated-looking pile of stuff to the Adwords newcomer. It leaves me uncertain whether or not I’ve actually succeeded in turning off all my campaigns. In fact it makes about as much sense as my mobile phone bill.
First principle in scams is this: do not use a link in ANY email that asks you to go update billing details. A credible organisation would ask you to log on as normal if anything needed reviewing or changing.
And additional give-away in this one is that the URL in the email goes to an non-secure server (http:// not https://).
And finally, Firefox flagged it up as having been reported as a scam site. Click on the thumbnail (above) to see the content of the email and Firefox’s response to the link it points to.
Nice try.
Meantime, Google, you could maybe simplify your billing / campaign control with a big red ‘STOP’ switch - i.e. give your customers a clear indication that all activity is OFF?
Out of interest, why is this site still up? Does it take days or weeks to decide a site is scamming? Or is there, perhaps, no-one to make that decision?
Boris Johnson BBC Radio 4 Today transcript - the Olympic interview
Boris explains how he plans to safeguard £10 billion.
Its amazing how uncritical we can be when we consume media such as radio and TV. It’s as if we become so hypnotised by the soothing flow of sound and pictures we overlook the absurdity of the content.
I’ve started freezing the moment in words to make sense of just how devoid of meaning they actually are - another example of someone with with nothing to say saying just that.
JH: Well the Olympic flag will pass to London tomorrow in the shape of Boris Johnson, Mayor of London since May. Mr. Johnson may or may not still be mayor when the London games begin in 2012 but what is certain is that there will be many rows between now and then over how preparations are progressing; there always are - there already have been. That’s the problem, it always is.
Mr. Johnson is on the line from Beijing, good morning to you
BJ: Good morning, John
JH: Now then, the Chinese spent £30-odd billion, we’re going to spend less than £10 billion, you say you will come in under budget…how?
BJ: Well, I’m absolutely determined to deliver a fantastic games and together with everybody involved in this we are resolved to produce..a.. brilliant British successor to these triumphant Beijing games.. ah, one that is full of wit and imagination, ingenuity, er, but is coming in under the £9.3 billion ceiling that we set ourselves…
Read more
themes.wordpress.com : what happened?
This is the current state of play of the Wordpress theme library.
There are two areas where I think Wordpress is in danger of losing out to other user-friendly CMS style web design packages.
The first is that choosing a template is becoming harder. Seems like because Wordpress is an open-source project there’s no ownership and nothing to sell.
As a result, it doesn’t seem to matter that there’s no way a designer can get an overview of all the themes available. Go to the new themes page and you’ll find that no-one’s thought of putting a ‘view all’ option on the page. Same if you go to the plugins page.
The second area is in how badly documented everything to do with Wordpress is. I’ve said it before but there’s a growing ‘how-to’ information gap. In fact, it’s become a canyon and if you’re a newcomer, it’s too big to jump across.
The problem with the information that does exist is that it’s written by people on the wrong side of the canyon: the developers who made the stuff. And they seem to have lost the ability to see things from the point of view of someone who doesn’t know what they know.
Yesterday, in trying to work out why the simplest plugin ever - ‘list category posts’ - wouldn’t work for me, I discovered it uses something called a ’shortcode’. That was the first time I’d ever come across that expression. What was it? I searched in the Wordpress codex. I got a long, in-depth article aimed at fellow-developers that was no use at all.
Is this the fate of ‘open-source’ tools? That because there’s no money to be made and no frustrated customer to deal with nobody has to think outside of their own viewframe?
What is ‘Google bait’ and what does a Google-baiting spammer look like?
Wouldn’t it be ironic if they thieved this post too?
Google-bait is *sigh* what we all do to a certain extent. It comes with the whole website, blog territory. The moment you’re using a keyword on your site or in your content, you’re setting bait to catch Google searchers.
So first thing to note - before any of us get too sanctimonious about this - is that it’s all a matter of degrees.
On the one hand, there are people like you and me who write content for our websites and blogs in order to both add value to a reader’s understanding (like this post) and also to ‘catch’ Google searchers and introduce them to what we do via our content. The fishing rod is our site; the bait is the keywords we sprinkle about.
On the other hand, there are people for whom content is just a device to funnel traffic past Google’s AdSense ads on their (faceless, depersonalised, trashy, spammy) sites. That’s what the naice people like you and me like to call ‘Google-baiting’.
Here are a couple of examples of what Google-baiting sites look like. The first is one that definitely steals content (probably automatically) and adds it to a blog stuffed with AdSense ads. You and I do the old-fashioned hard work, they reap the benefits in Google. If you recognise the content on that site it’s because it’s ours, from here.
The second is also a very familiar style: a blog so stuffed with AdSense adverts that you just KNOW the people behind it have no interest in the content (and have probably lifted it anyway).
What does a Google-baiting spammer look like? We’ll never know, since they never have the balls to be accountable for what they do. They just carry on doing it bedrooms across the world.
But one last thought. Are you really surprised? I’m not. This is the world that Google - and we - created. If there aren’t enough critical thinkers left to draw attention to what it’s doing to knowledge as we knew it, then so be it, we’re getting what we deserve.
Duplication of my blog content - will Google kill me?
No - but it might give the thief ownership of your stuff
I’ve noticed posts that hit the right places in Google’s natural search results can suddenly disappear off the radar without explanation (there’s never an explanation, let’s face it).
This morning, however, while looking for a vanished post, I did a blog search on the key phrase in question and found this:
That got my Columbo head going.
The top one is our site but the summary in Google’s index is only the last lines of the post in question… and the post in question has vanished from Google’s natural search results.
The bottom one is my post in a spammers site - stolen and used as Google bait for their ad-sense spam. The summary is the full summary.
Without knowing what’s actually going on inside Google, a layman’s guess is that Google has decided that the spammers own the indexed version of the post, not me.
The result is that they hold the full page title and header summary for my post indexed against their domain. The fact that it doesn’t come up in a Google web search suggests that the thieving site either has no page rank or is otherwise penalised.
Make no mistake. When Google created their search engine, they could have put it to use for good or evil. AdWords could be argued to be a social evil - given what it does to the body of information globally. Ad-Sense (where you and I get paid for hosting Google ads on our ’sites’) is definately evil.
Think about it. It’s the ultimate, lowest-common-denominator, ‘get-rich-quick’ trash. What else would any rational person expect other than an explosion of fake sites, automatically updated with other people’s content earning invisible spammers money on click-throughs.
We are in danger of reaching a point where none of this works because the ad revenue model is too attractive to too many sleazy people who. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s the ideal ‘work at home’ opportunity.
However, if this ‘advertising-shapes-knowledge’ model doesn’t change, we are all - and I make no apologies for this - screwed and the online world will become a wasteland.
How to sell your cartoons online
(Instead of having people use them without permission)
If you’re a cartoonist and you want to sell or license your cartoons for people to use in their blogs, then you could start by ANSWERING YOUR DAMN EMAILS when a blogger writes to ask you how much it will cost to use one of your cartoons.
What’s happened to Twitter (again)?
It’s conked out, that’s what.
I wouldn’t mind except that using it as a newsfeed means that every time Twitter dies, so does our site.
So despite having got a client all excited about Twitter this morning, this afternooon I had to remove it and go in search of an alternative that actually works.
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