Today’s Media Links
Askimet Betas a “Ham” Chart
You see the bluish stuff at the bottom of this Askimet chart?
That’s legitimate comments (they call “ham”). The rest is spam! Maybe this is more science fiction on my part but it’s not hard to imagine that major commercial “interests” who see little to gain from a free and open Internet with informed, distributed and organized “consumers” are investing heavily in the orange stuff. Eventually this “mysterious” malicious Internet presence will bring the Web to its knees but there will be an alternate network waiting to “save” us.
More Cringely Terror: “The $200 Billion Rip-Off”
In “The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen” Robert X. Cringely sounds like the Malcolm X of IT by making it plain:
As just a small example of the way the phone companies took advantage of ineffectual regulation, they charged an average of $1 per month per customer to run Bellcore, the research organization set up to replace Bell Labs after the 1983 split up of AT&T. But when Bellcore was later sold and the profits from that sale distributed to the telephone companies, not to the customers, ALL BUT ONE RBOC CONTINUED THE $1 CHARGE DESPITE THE FACT THAT IT NO LONGER DIRECTLY SUPPORTED ANYTHING.
Too many properly assimilated Americans have this implicit cave-man-like trust in the flesh men that run corporations. They assume that these brutes will exploit ‘the other’ instead of prey upon ‘their own’—and this is why a racist model of the universe is so important for the masters of the American consumer.
To jump back from the ‘R’-word, certainly any seasoned business professional should be aware that, in a B2B transaction, the billing company will make continual (often automated) attempts to overcharge. It actually costs more money for the company being charged to investigate these violations until the amount overcharged reaches a certain delta. This delta is often monitored automatically. Average American consumers have no automated system to protect themselves from the same kind of overcharging. The advances in computer technology make it possible to discriminate against one person down to the minutest detail.
Only a few, recessive-gene elites in the world look at tax dollars like a virgin rain forest…
My wacky DreamHost.com gang: “The Internet is not for People”
In “The Internet is not for People” my current shared hosting provider tells the truth:
We’re a minority out there, you and I! The Internet circa 2007 is made of robots, by robots, for robots! By rampant extrapolation, almost 95% of the page views to the entire Internet are made by machines!
All these robots cause problems though. It’s been well known since 1994 that 99.99% of the sites on the Internet get absolutely NO traffic. It’s how web hosts make money.
But now, that’s all changed! The only thing safe to say is 99.99% of the sites on the Internet get absolutely no HUMAN traffic! Every site now gets search engine spiders, feed aggregators, and spammers… a veritable ARMY of undead automotrons! And those undead robot hits hit your site just as hard as living human hits.
A ton of times in the past, a site was crashing a shared server, and it turned out all we had to do was block Googlebot from visiting it and everything was fine. We figured that was better than just disabling the entire site, and yet sometimes we caught some crazy flak for it! Which saddened us so greatly we even made a wiki page to try and explain the situation.
Now does this explanation cover why SonghaySystem.com still runs ‘slow’ after I stopped using MySQL and turned to a SQLite, file-based approach?
Why no comments for The Money Coach?
My guess is that Lynnette Khalfani, The Money Coach, gets no comments on her Blog because she turned them off. However, her technorati.com rating (as dubious as they are) has been a little low. It does not make sense to me how an author of so many books—that makes so many public and television appearances—gets such low Web numbers.
My other guess is that she only started her Blog recently… And it’s not like Lynnette Khalfani is not being savvy with the Web. She is a model of how business people without IT skills should use the Web—because I am swaggeringly certain that after she survived paying for the production of http://www.themoneycoach.net/ she went on to use blogspot.com and gabcast.com for free. My ignorant assertion is that the stuff she paid for was established before the Blog and other “Web 2.0” stuff went into the mainstream. And, indeed, according to Alexa.com, her site went live in May of 2004.
Email Marketing & Blogging Software—iContact
“iContact allows businesses, non-profit organizations, and associations to easily create, publish, and track email newsletters, surveys, blogs, autoresponders, and RSS feeds. We believe that email marketing should be really easy and have built and designed iContact from the ground up to give you all the features you need while still making it easy enough for anyone to use.”