Posted May 6th, 2008, in: Spam and Scams

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Posted April 23rd, 2008, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| New Media| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Spam and Scams| Technology| Viral Marketing| Web 2.0

Lately I get about 100 organic hits to my blog per day, which isn’t bad considering…

Yesterday I posted an ad on craigslist (Free Stuff in the North Bay/Marin Area) in response to an item being offered for free and I included a link in the ad linking to the rant I posted here about it (the painting I wanted). In the first half hour or so I got around 100 hits from craigslist! And it keeps coming…

If I was a spammer, which I’m not, I’d seriously consider trying to leverage craigslist’s community and traffic.

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Posted April 21st, 2008, in: Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Spam and Scams| Videos

Web Pyramid Schemes, “Gifting Programs,” “Phil In New Mexico”

If you’re reading this, and you found this page via a google search, I think it may be prudent for you to go read this wikipedia entry on Pyramid Schemes.

WATCH VIDEO!!

ANOTHER AWESOME VID!

The other day I glanced at the gigs section of the local CraigsList, and saw an ad titled

“Internet Marketing, One Person is All I’m Looking For”

the copy of the ad was like this:

This is a gifting program. If you would like proof from me, I can show you proof of the program’s longevity and seriousness, and, if you like, its legality.

For your marketing efforts, for every visitor who signs up I will pay you 20% of the relevant price point. Price points start at $500, to $10,000 max.

Thanks very much for your interest.
2informew@earthlink.net

References or proof of work required, please.

I wrote to 2informew@earthlink.net which was included in the craigslist post and asked what it was they are looking for help with, since I’m pretty hip to Web Marketing.

Phil Blumberg aka “Phil in New Mexico” responded:
Hello Andrew–
I need to drive as much traffic as possible to the gifting site.
You can go to the splash page (without signing up) the URL is www.overnightcashexplosion.com/3/PB59736
You can go directly to the main site the URL is www.overnightcashexplosion.com/PB59736/tour.asp/
It would be great if you get a chance to read the text or most of the text on the 2nd site.
Each visitor who joins decides what level to come in on: $500, $1000, $2500, $5000, or $10,000. Whatever the newly signed-up’s level, you would get 20% of that amount.
So check it out. I really look forward to your responses.

Sincerely,
Phil in New Mexico
2informew@earthlink.net
philinnewmexico@earthlink.net

ME: So… Where does the other 80% go? And what do people get for signing up? I mean what is their incentive?

PHIL: The websites are mine because I’ve already joined the program. The 80% is mine for the same reason, and because I’m choosing to spend money to market the site. The people I bring in pay me directly; those people will bring in people of their own who pay them directly. When you can, check out the main site. Thanks–Phil

I googled the email address and found some really ugly websites and other craigslist ads, all seeming to be for the sake of promoting this “system” for generating money. Notably, SimpleGiftCash.com and FreeLunchRoom.com. Go take a look! They’re fun!

To me this looked like a Pyramid scheme. But rather than ask Phil if he realizes that pyramid schemes are illegal, I thought I’d try to get some more information:

ME: Has it worked for you? How much have you made from the program so far?

So far, he hasn’t written back.

This got me thinking. If I can take advantage of people who are naive, and I can get them to send me $500, in the hope of getting rich themselves, should I do it?

I think not. I generally have problems putting value on knowledge. I generally have problems operating in a capitalist scenario, where scarcity is so important. I generally really want to help people and it’s impossible to put a monetary value on empathy. I certainly don’t want to take advantage of people. I hate this kind of thing. It makes me sick.

On a lighter note, here’s some really fun images:

Want that watch? I bet you do.

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Posted April 18th, 2008, in: Evil Robots| Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Spam and Scams| Technology

I can’t believe this is still going on. Perhaps it’s worthwhile to these jerks to do this, as they continually cash in on the occasional newb?

I won a free laptop? Really?

This one was compelling to me, thus the few minutes I decided to waste posting this.

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Posted April 7th, 2008, in: Evil Robots| New Media| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Semantic Web| Spam and Scams| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)| Web 2.0

I’ve mentioned before how increasingly the ‘Live Web’ or ‘Blogosphere’ (or whatever you want to call this thing) is being infiltrated by Robot Blogs. What they appear to be doing is crawling the web and scraping excerpts of blog posts and reposting the excerpts, linking back to where it came from. They usually say:

“[KeyWord] wrote an interesting post today”

Since they link back to the blog post they scraped, they show up as a trackback in the comments area of the original post. This way, the unsuspecting blogger is linking to the fake blog. The fake blogs seem to be set up in an attempt at monetizing traffic via adsense ads.

I googled the phrase “wrote an interesting post today” and the top hit was (I probably am the top hit now) some blogger talking about filtering any comment that contains the phrase “wrote an interesting post today.”

I had decided to change my little tagline thingy to this exact phrase as a sort of inside joke for bloggers, but found myself wondering if being associated with that phrase will adversely effect my findability. Perhaps Search Engines or Spam Filters will begin to look out for that phrase?

Already, I bet there are tons of bloggers who filter out comments containing words like “viagra” or “casino,” assuming that there is absolutely no context in which these words could be used in a legitimate discussion. The fact that I am using those words here is proof that there is such a thing as a legitimate discussion which contains them.

Filtering for a word or phrase seems to me to be a slippery slope, especially if we’re talking about Search Engines, since they act as our main interface to the Web.

Google: Please don’t hate me because I said Viagra. I’m not a spammer.

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