While flipping through the local cable channels this weekend, Kayla stopped me at a movie called “Cabin Fever” and insisted that I watch it. We’d only missed the first 7 minutes so I said sure, why not?

About 25 minutes later, I actually had to get up and leave the room. There were so many plot holes and stupid scenes in this movie that I couldn’t take it anymore. Heck, the over use of the word “gay” was enough to make me shut it off. Here’s some of my favorite parts:

• During a campfire scene, a guy enters and ties his dog to a tree. Later, when leaving he whistles and the dog follows him away. How? It was still tied to a tree. This wouldn’t be so bad, however later in the movie the dog plays a crucial role. All I could think about is how this can’t be happening because that dog is still tied to that tree.
• The language. Do kids really say stuff like this? Here’s one exchange after a couple’s first kiss:
  

  Guy: “so, is this like, a date or something?”
  Girl: “Don’t be Gay”

  That doesn’t make any sense.

• The decision making is completely unrealistic. Imagine if you will that you’re standing outside of your cabin and a sick man approaches you asking for help. do you:
  a.) Call a Doctor for him.
  b.) Offer to drive him into town
  c.) Say, sorry you can’t help him
  or d.) Shoot him with a rifle, set him on fire, and run away.

  These kids chose d.

Worst. Movie. Ever.

Update:Patrick Gavin has contacted me and appologized for the misunderstanding. Apparantley I was correct in pointing out that they don’t mention anything about using rel=nofollow on the website, so currently it is not a violation of their TOS. My account is now in good standing with TLA.com, however I’ve yet to re-instantiate the ads on the webpage in question. This issue has raised a personal debate with myself about the ethics involved in selling text-link-ads. If you have any opinions on this, please leave a comment.

One of the new crazes in advertising is paid content. Patrick Gavin is making a fortune with his text-link-ads.com and reviewme.com websites (not linked to on purpose). They were unique and creative ways to build traffic to your website.

Up until today, I was a text-link-ads.com user, but not in the sense that most users use the site. See, I sold ads that no search engine sees. I used a link condom (the rel=nofollow tag). According to Matt Cutts of Google, this is a reccomended use.

Anyway, these links must have worked. The same people kept paying me $25 every month to continue their links. By my own estimates, 12% of my users who filled out a form on this webpage clicked on an advertisement link afterwards. Their ads ran on every page of my website. They got traffic, and I got enough money to continue hosting the website.

Apparantley though, as Drew from Text-Link-Ads mentioned in his email, using the rel=nofollow tag is a violatin of the text-link-ads TOS. It’s also the reason they’re not paying me this month. (yet as of this writing, they continue to show ads on my site that they don’t pay me for) Does that sound fair to you?

So, I scoured their site for the TOS and guess what? Nowhere on their site is the nofollow tag mentioned. It’s not in their faq, nor has Google ever seen it mentioned there. In fact, according to that link other publishers have been doing it too!

To make matters worse, I actually sent (not 1, but 3) emails asking about the nofollow tag before I signed up. All 3 emails were through their contact us form, but I got no reply. After 2 months of not hearing from them I decided it must be ok, and added in the rel=nofollow tag. After all, if they didn’t want me messing with the code they’d use some sort of JavasScript, not just give me the PHP to copy and paste right?

Now all of a sudden some TOS page that doesn’t exist says I’m not allowed to do what I’ve been doing? And they’re taking my money away because of that? Screw that, I’ve taken the TLA code off of my websites and sent in 2 requests to have my sites de-listed from Text-Link-Ads. (of course, a few hours later I have no reply to these emails either) What’s going on here? Patrick, I thought you were better than that

Not too long ago I wrote about what it was like to be a blogger in the early days. The main difference? Scarcity, and spam. Spam just didn’t exist then like it does now.

As anybody who runs a blog can tell you, spam is out of control. It wasn’t so bad when I had my own custom code, but that all changed when I installed WordPress. I started getting spam before I even turned the WordPress version live. After that, it increased by about 45 or so messages per day. Something had to be done.

The first step was installing Akismet. That managed to catch those 45 messages / day and mark them as spam, but they still sat there in my database until I could delete them. That’s clearly not optimal.

Thankfully, I remembered what Jeremy does on his blog. You saw this on the old dotCULT too. Up until now though, I’ve had no idea if it worked or not. Guess what, it works great!

So what is it? It’s the “type Ryan here” box on the comments form. Since I installed that, I’ve gotten only 1 spam comment (and it was a trackback from a spam blog) – much better than the 45 I was expecting.

So why does something simple work so well? And what about captchas, mathchas, and kitten auth schemes?

Well, it seems the key to the “type Ryan here” isn’t that it’s easy for a human and hard for a computer. It’s that it’s specific to dotCULT. In other words, it doesn’t make sense for somebody to code their bot to type Ryan into forms if it will only work on one website. The reason these bots work so well in the first place is because thanks to WordPress, all the comment forms are the same.

Try it out on your site. All you have to do is make a change to the standard form (and make it required). Unless a spammer is gung ho on spamming just your site, you should see your spam signficantly drop off.

By now you’ve probably noticed the links in the side menu, so you probably know that noslang.com is one of my websites. I’ve been dedicating weekends to working on it and my other sites. Well, I’ve been slacking – bigtime!

I usually check the user submitted words every weekend… but I haven’t done so in about 3 weeks. I’ve just been busy. I was in Texas a couple weekends ago, did some FeedButton updates last weekend etc..

So I just logged in, and boom! 900 words waiting to be approved. This is going to take some time.

If you’re not familiar with my approval process it’s like this:

1.) Check word to see if it makes sense
2.) Make sure everything is spelled correctly (I don’t fix improper spellings, no time really)
3.) Google for the word.

If It makes sense, is spelled correctly, and exists on at least 1 other forum or website.. then I add it. If not, I kill it. that’s part of what makes NoSlang the best internet slang dictionary on the internet (and the only internet slang book too!) While other sites are trying to build a large database by paying per word submitted, NoSlang actually takes hours upon hours of human evaluation. It’s starting to get to be too much.

Does anybody else have a few hours they can donate to this for free? I wouldn’t think anybody would – but it can’t hurt to ask. Right?

powered by performancing firefox

While more and more companies are entering into a paid search battle to get more traffic it seems that newspapers are trying to do just the opposite. This is especially the case in Belgium. First there was the court case that ruled against Google claiming that they couldn’t index a Belgian newspaper. Now, as TechDirt points out, it looks like they’re going after Yahoo.

In an effort to help out, I’m now going to tell all newspapers how to get their sites de-listed from ALL search engines without having to hire a lawyer.

Step 1: Create a new text file called robots.txt The easiest way to do this is to click on start in the lower left corner, click run. Now, type in “notepad robots.txt”. A Windows prompt will come up saying “cannot find file, would you like to create one?”. Select Yes.

Step 2: Enter the following text:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /


Don’t forget to save this file.

Step 3: Upload this file to your server. You may have to talk to somebody from your tech team for help with this. Another way is to go to start, run and this time type in ftp://Username:[email protected]. (of course, replace username, password and yoursite with the actual details. Then, you can just drag and drop the robots.txt file into the window. Congratulations! You’ve now blocked Google AND Yahoo from visiting your website, and it didn’t even cost you any retainer fees.

Of course you’ve also cut off millions of potential visitors, which begs the question “Why are you even putting your articles online if you don’t want anybody to see them?”

Some of you have asked me why their comments didn’t show up right away, so I just want to make a quick update so I have something to point to later. I probably don’t need this, and it’s most likely overkill… but here goes.

ALL comments come to me first (that is, if they’re not killed off by the akismet spam filter. It stops that refinance guy about 20 times / day so far). Once I approve one of your comments, then it’ll let you post the rest to the main page (you have to use the same name that I approved… a good way to send me a private message is to use a new name and tell me not to approve it)

In addition to that, any comment that has a hyperlink in it gets held for me to approve too. I’m usually very quick to approve comments (within an hour unless I’m sleeping or playing hockey)

Also… all comment links will get a rel=nofollow added (along with any links to your homepage that you enter)

Here’s some other guidelines to ensure that I approve your comment:

1.) Please keep it on-topic. I’ll pretty much approve anything unless you’re just ranting about something unrelated or shamelessly promoting your own crap. Only I can shamelessly promote crap on dotCULT.

2.) Please don’t post incriminating or identifying information about other people. As long as what you type is legal and doesn’t infringe on somebody else’s rights, I’ll probably approve it. I’m not here to censor your opinions.

Hopefully, the combination of these policies will result in no more spam. We can only dream right?

I just booked a trip to Texas for the first week of February, and I don’t have any good books to read.  I was hoping you guys could reccomend some good books for me.  I can usually get through 2 smaller books, or 1 decent sized book in the 6 -8 hours of reading involved in waiting for the plane, on the plane, waiting for my ride, etc.

To help you out, here’s a list of books I’ve read recently:

The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The NightTime
The Alchemest
The Stranger
Freakonomics
Blink
Mensa Guide to Blackjack
Henderson The Rain King
Tuesdays With Morrie
Programming Pearls

I’ve picked up The Chocolate War (to re-read.. haven’t read it since 8th grade), and also a copy of Mitch Albom’s new book.  I forget what it’s called.

What else is good??

Also… I have a couple DVD’s I’d like to watch, but I don’t have a portable DVD player.  Does anybody know of some free* software available for ripping a DVD to my iPod? 

*  People who know me know that I don’t pirate software, or even download movies or music.  Please keep that in mind when reccomending software.  I only want to copy a DVD that I own onto my iPod so that I can view it on the plane.

Wired Reports that four families are suing MySpace after their underage daughters met up with men who sexually abused them.  I’m not an advocate of abusing underage (or normal aged) girls, but is MySpace really to blame?

In one of the cases, the girl was 14 or 15, and the boy was only 19.  The MySpace suit is based on the fact that his profile said he was a senior in high school and he wasn’t.

Is it the responsibility of a website to monitor what it’s users do in real life?  In all of these cases the accused had no past criminal records, weren’t on the sex offender list, and didn’t have suspicious profiles (like a 40 year old who has a million 15 year old friends.)  How is MySpace responsible for this?

The communications decency act of 1994 basically rules that content providers aren’t responsible for their users content – the users are.  I think this holds true here.  Sure they may have met on MySpace, but does that make MySpace liable for what they do afterwards?

In all of these cases, the girls voluntarily met up with their attackers.  In many of them, the attackers didn’t lie about their ages.  That’s right: these girls knew they were meeting up with older men.  Seems to me that’s the root of the problem right there. 

If these cases succeed, shouldn’t gun companies be liable for all gun related deaths?  Do we hold websites responsible if somebody steals your credit card and uses it there?  Is Toyota responsible for not preventing your auto accident?  How about holding mothers responsible for letting their underage daughters on the internet unsupervised to arrange meetings with older men?  I think that’d be a good law too.

Having previously worked in fast food management, retail, and marketing I’ve come to have a firm understanding of upselling. Whether it’s suggesting cheese or a combo meal, “complete the triangle”, or reccomending high margin accessories, I’ve done it all. In fact, just last month we were remarking how much money the local Thai place could make if they started asking people what they wanted to drink instead of just serving water.

There’s a concept in upselling that I like to refer to as the grab 5 principle. I call it that because as a teenager at Best Buy, the best way to sell somebody an extra ink cartridge with their printer is to reccomend that they buy 5. This way, the most common response is “I’ll take one.” It’s upselling by absurdity – and it works.

When using this technique though, you have to be careful. It IS possible to overdo it. Let’s take a look at how GoDaddy does it.

Earlier today I was looking to buy a new domain name, and gave GoDaddy a try. After finding a name that was available, GoDaddy reccomended to me that I should also buy the .net, .org, .biz, .info, and .us names as well. Since my name is for a potential company, I decided that I needed to protect my brand by registering all it’s variants.

If you look at the image below though, they then suggested 25 more similiar domain names I should buy. I figured that Google does this so that nobody can have a similiar domain, so it’s probably a good idea if I do so too. It looks like they give a nice discount for doing a 10 year registration, and it’s rumored that Google looks at length of registrations as a ranking factor, so I’ll be going the 10 year route.

The next page asks if I want to order the standard (no extra charge), deluxe, or protected plan. Wanting the business registration and expiration protection I opted for the extra $25/year protected plan.

I hadn’t thought about hosting yet, but thankfully there’s the next page full of options.
$29.99/yr takes care of all my email for me.
Add in another $70 for somethign called Traffic Blaster (who doesn’t want traffic right? It’s cheaper than Adwords)
Since I’m taking orders online I might need a merchant account and shopping cart. Luckily, $50 is a good deal compared to the competition.

Since the site isn’t ready yet, and it’s such a great domain name I might as well do the cash parking option. I’m spending a lot so making some money back while my domain sits there useless sounds good to me. Tack on $10 more.

So.. what’s my Total? Well, after adding in everything that GoDaddy suggested to me, It looks like I’m up to….

$18,061.31

At least I won’t have to go through that again for another 10 years.

Here’s a tip to everybody in the business world:  If you want something to get done, don’t CC anybody on the email.

At least 20 times / day I get CCed on an email asking for something to be done, and I’m sure you can guess my gut reaction:  “Mike, Will, or Chris will probably take care of this.”

The problem in this situation is that Mike, Will, and Chris are thinking along the same lines.

If you want to make sure something gets done, make sure you only send your request out to one person – preferably one with the authority to delegate tasks.  This way, there’s a chain of accountability.  It also saves people the extra time of sending emails to everybody involved to see if they already took care of the issue or not.