Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category

Niched jargon more overrated than sliced bread!

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

It’s amazing, every second person following me on twitter is a Guru … “Hello, my name is xxx and I’m a guru at internet marketing” or “Are you in need of more woman? Subscribe to my newsletter and get some tonight”

Or how about some real life examples, here are the Twitter Biographies of a bunch of so-called Gurus:

Everyone claiming to be a Guru is trying to sell you something you don’t need, especially all these hyped up MLM schemes which is nothing other than scams plastered with jargonatic adjectives.

Gurus - Do You Believe The Claims Made On Late Night Infomercials? Sign Up For Our Newsletter Today!

Do You Believe The Claims Made On Late Night Infomercials? Sign Up For Our Newsletter Today!

I’m reading through a marketing e-book which I got for free because I was able to respond and enter my email address before the respond-before timer ran out … actually it ran out and then started counting all over again telling me the free offer has been extended due to popular demand. And guess what, the e-book used to cost $1997 and I’m getting it for free, apparently I should be grateful for not having to pay $1997 for it. Just scanning through the index, I’m being bombarded with hyped up jargon …

Wait, just received an email from another one of these Guru marketers badmouthing the hype around the book I’ve just downloaded for free …

I’m a little frustrated with all the crap that’s going on.

There are SO many “miracle” product launches
happening, and people are shelling their hard earned
cash on every single one of them.

Today it was xxx – everybody
seems to be promoting it.

I’m not.

Not to say it isn’t a good deal or it won’t help some
people, but here’s the deal…

I’ve discovered a few factors that are consistent
among successful internet marketers, but one that
REALLY stands out is…

Where was I before I got distracted by another Guru that knows it all … oh, the index page of the book … the page where I downloaded it said something about the niche jargon being a little bit outdated and it’s being adjusted to reflect the jargon of WEB 2.0 (another overhyped keyword, I bet these marketers doesn’t even know what powers WEB 2.0 applications). Back to the book … the index reads like a typical marketing handbook, all fluffetyfoo and full of power punching poo that will make your product the niche that everyone else wants to do (while 5 million other people are trying the same thing after downloading the free ebook with the magic formula of how to make it online). Before I get distracted again, Viral Marketing, Marketing Funnel (another word for MLM where the people at the top of the pyramid just milks their participants for a lot more money), Dumb Down the Site, Powerful Admin Sections, Split Pay for Affiliate Programs, Pop-unders (It’s like a popup, only more annoying as it pops up behind your browser), OTO (The acronym for The One Time Offer Phenomenon), List Building, Lead Generation, Social Media (which is a buzzword for giving a company an online presence through whatever floats their boat), etc …

Online marketers are the new spammers of the internet, they aren’t good at anything, except for inflating their status by deflating the status of other marketers.

Spam - When You Aren't Any Good At Your Job, You Can Always Just Turn In Your Competitors.

When You Aren't Any Good At Your Job, You Can Always Just Turn In Your Competitors.

All these internet marketers have blogs, if you set your “looking for” status on Facebook to Networking, you’ll be swarmed with internet marketers trying to promote their blog which in the end might as well have been a Huffman keyword algorithm generating random hyped up buzzwords which holds very little value seeing as the “Secret To …” is always on another page for which you have to click a trackable link to an affiliate’s page.

Blogging - Those Who Have Nothing Important To Say Often Speak The Most.

Those Who Have Nothing Important To Say Often Speak The Most.

Forums dedicated to emarketing are just as bad, especially if the forum was created by a Guru who wants to sell a niche and have millions of users who worship him …

Forums - Multiply An Enormous Number By Zero And You're Still Going To End Up With Zero.

Multiply An Enormous Number By Zero And You're Still Going To End Up With Zero.

“Social Media” became a buzzword amongst some of the Gurus while the real experts will throw you with a brick if you just mention the phrase. If I were to meet up with a group of marketers and you start throwing me with the “Social Media” jargon, expect to be thrown with a brick and drowned under concrete, the world wants practical solutions, not hyped up rubbish. Giving a brand an online presence is fine, but it shouldn’t be the be-all of your marketing campaign.

Social Media - Maybe Your Peers Don't Make The Best Judges, Better Make Some Sock Puppets.

Maybe Your Peers Don't Make The Best Judges, Better Make Some Sock Puppets.

SEO Gurus, the internet is so full of people claiming that they are the best at cheating search engine results, it’s like calling yourself an expert at pushing yourself into the front of a row and getting payed to do so.

SEO - Let's Face It, If We Were Really That Smart, We Would Have Been Buying Generic Domain Names.

Let's Face It, If We Were Really That Smart, We Would Have Been Buying Generic Domain Names.

Most of them claim to be White Hat SEO gurus, in other words, they ask politely before they push themselves in front of the row, they follow all the so-called rules and regulations that were made up by search engine companies and they are generally too afraid to play outside the barbwire electric fence on top of the 10 foot thick concrete wall.

White Hat - Just Because You Follow The Rules Doesn't Mean You Can't Rank For Competitive Terms. Oh Wait, Yes It Does.

Just Because You Follow The Rules Doesn't Mean You Can't Rank For Competitive Terms. Oh Wait, Yes It Does.

Some of these White Hat SEO Gurus will tell you they specialize in link building. From what I’ve read in several sources, Google will actually penalize your page rank if you link to an outside source and not use the “nofollow” flag (unless the link is relevant, not sure how Google’s new double standards are working); thus link spammers will have their own site’s page rank dropped to zero pretty quickly diminishing the impact they have on the other site’s page rank.

Link Building - Look At Me Mom! Hey! Are You Looking? Over Here! Watch! Are You Watching? Please!

Look At Me Mom! Hey! Are You Looking? Over Here! Watch! Are You Watching? Please!

Black Hat SEO Gurus will always have a dark secret that nobody must know about, yet they want to sell you this secret on how to get an “unfair” advantage in the market. Some of the techniques include link building wherin the Guru does a link / banner exchange with random webmasters and then simply use the robots.txt / .htaccess to block all spiders from accessing the links or toggling the “nofollow” flag based on the user’s IP address so that spiders see “nofollow” and users doesn’t see it (which effectively leads to having only links pointing to your site and nothing pointing back to the other site according to the web crawler’s point of view).

The biggest “niche” is to scrape the web for content around a certain niche and simply steal that content for their own automated / generated blogs while stacking those fake blogs with a crapload of ads. This is especially true for Gurus trying to make money of the highest paying keywords (where the competition is tough, for $70+ a click on a Google AdSense ad, I can understand why being the absolute number one and getting the highest cut out of click-pie is so important). Get caught using Black Hat SEO techniques and your site might get blacklisted or severely penalized … but that’s ok, these Black Hatters have plenty of sites they can use to conduct their mischief and overpower the search engine algorithms.

Black Hat - Cloaking Scraped Content Written By A Markov Generator Is Just Another Way Of Enhancing The User Experience.

Cloaking Scraped Content Written By A Markov Generator Is Just Another Way Of Enhancing The User Experience.

Calling yourself a Guru is a dangerous thing, you better be able to live up to those incredible high standards if you want to go around calling yourself a Guru.

Any other annoying “Gurus” that you can think of?

Facebook now owns your content legally

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

I will no longer have my blog automatically imported into Facebook notes as the new terms of service that Facebook decided to sneak in say that Facebook can overwrite your copyright and take ownership of whatever you import or link to from outside of Facebook.
In other words, if you earn money advertising on your blog, and you import your notes into Facebook, then technically Facebook can sue you for making money of “their” content. By importing blog entries into the Facebook “Notes” application, you’re basically giving up ownership of the content, whether you agreed to it or not, they made provision for that by stating if you continue to use Facebook, you’re automatically agreeing to the new terms of service whether you’ve seen it or not.

Technically they can sue me if they want to, even if I delete my account, their terms of service say that they retain copyright on everything, even after your account is deleted, not that they delete your content when you delete your account, they just deactivate your account and maintain their copyright on your social media.

The full article can be found here.

Can they really afford to have another mass uproar of angry users deleting their accounts after the Facebook Beacon scandal and after their stock value plummeted to $8.88 (from $35.90)? They are playing with fire, we’ll soon see them get burned by their own greed for power.


Gmail is tracking your links!

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

When you take a look at the following screenshot of an email recieved and take a closer look at the links inside the email, it looks like a regular email with normal links inside it.

gmail2

gmail3

Now observe what their sneaky onclick URL rewrite function does … (it’s only visible for a few milliseconds)

gmail4

Everytime you click on a URL in Gmail, it’s tracked!

The interesting thing about Google Chrome is, they never show this redirection link which makes me wonder, is this type of tracking functionality built into Chrome or are they simply using Chrome to cover their tracks? The fact that it autoupdates means it is sending information back and forth to Google the whole time, what is stopping them from sending tracking information back and forth? 

Think it is time to analyze exactly what is being sent back and forth between Chrome and Google, Google tracking my links is already a violation of privacy!

Who is Santa and why is he FAT?

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

One picture says it all:

It really amazes me how superficial the world has become, every year around this time, people are running around like squirrels struggling to find that perfect gift for whoever they’re buying gifts. It’s not even sincere gifts, people only give gifts because of mass indoctrination by consumer driven capitalist elite and their greedy marketing teams who puts some irritating ho-ho-ho after every item being advertised (maybe that’s sarcasm for something? Everything we sell is as cheap as a ho, ho-ho-ho, now we know why he’s always blushing, ho-ho-ho) or some other annoying mascot which is from the capitalists’ version of Christmas.

I believe it’s my duty to disprove Santa’s existance as he’s stealing the original meaning of Christmas for the sake of profit … here’s the math behind Santa:

There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world.
However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the
Population Reference Bureau).

At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical).

This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second – 3,000 times the speed of sound.

For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour. 

The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element.

Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself.

On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the “flying” reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with eight or even nine of them-Santa would need 360,000 of them.

This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance – this would heat up the
reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering the earth’s atmosphere.

The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each.

In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake.

The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.

Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,500 g’s.

A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of red goo.

Therefore, if Santa did exist, he’s dead now (thank goodness for that)

 

November 29th is international buy nothing day, the idea is to spend one day not buying anything and thinking about why you’re buying stuff. Quite a large number of people only buy stuff to fill a void, impress other people or to waste time. 

Instead of spending your day shopping, rather spend time thinking about:

Where does all this stuff come from?

Where will it go?

Why do we buy it?

Aren’t there better ways of spending our time?

For more information on this brilliant initiative, take a look at http://www.buynothingday.info/main.html

PS, the comics are from Lapsura, lots more satire where that came from :-)

 

SMS-Lingo Must DIE!!!

Friday, April 11th, 2008

I am now utterly frustrated with people sending me messages and email in SMS lingo, for goodness sake, just type out the whole ####### word!!

In my world every acronym has a probability of 50% or higher to have a different meaning in a different context; let’s take the acronym PDF for example:

In software PDF is commonly used for Portable Document Format or incorrectly referred to as Portable Data Format to describe documents compatible with portable devices and once in a while somebody will use it to say Postscript Document Format (which is incorrect, it should actually be PS and not PDF). Postscript printers often use the acronym PDF for Printer Description File, the file containing the specifications of a postscript printer. PDF is sometimes jokingly used to make fun of pedophiles, or written as Pe-Do-Files, not sure why though.

Back in high school when I first discovered Paradox databases, the acronym PDF meant Paradox Data File, the file in which the database is stored. When coding in low-level or assembler, PDF is referred to Processor Defined Function, for example, this function is a Processor Defined Function for the Intel 486, but in the Intel 8086 that specific function doesn’t work.

In Math / Statistics, PDF stands for Probability Distribution Function or Probability Density Function, they usually specify which one they are referring to. In web development, PDF is occasionally referred to as Personal Data Form, in medical science; PDF might mean Parkinson’s Disease Foundation (such an organization does exist), in polymer sciences, PDF is often referred to as Pair Distribution Function (has something to do with density of interatomic distances in a material, not a boffin in that field, so don’t ask me to explain it to you).

Have heard the acronym PDF in the context of Post Doctoral Fellowship as well as in several country’s defense force acronyms, for example Panamanian Defense Force, Permanent Defense Force (as used by the Irish Army) or in several books they will occasionally use the acronym PDF for Popular Defense Force obviously describing common defense force tactics used by the military. A few others you might have heard in the military context are Principal / Primary Direction of Fire or Point Detonating Fuse.

In physics you’ll often see PDF being used for Particle Distribution Function or in digital electronic engineering (signal processing), I’ve seen PDF being used for a Programmable Data Format (Software Radios). Low sulfur diesel becomes Premier Diesel Fuel, in neuroscience, Pulse Density Function, in a book written on Peer-to-Peer video streaming, PDF is referred to as Path Diversity with Forward Error Correction and I’m positive that if you search for more, you’ll probably find a lot more than I’ve just mentioned here.

To make matters worse, there’s no standard definition in SMS lingo for the acronym PDF, have seen it being used mostly in the following way: [Pretty (the only consistent word so far)] [Darn / Damn] [Fast / Fat / Funky / Frivoled (if such a word exists) / F#$ked / Funny]

Let’s take another one, DC which is often used to say: “I’ve been disconnected” can also mean Direct Current, Distribution Center, Data Compression, District Commissioner and also a popular peer-to-peer program used in Stellenbosch, called DC, the shortened form of Direct Connect.

SMS lingo is a disease; I’ve discovered a few SMS-Lingo-Dictionaries on the internet and even in their one-page excuse for a dictionary, I find inconsistencies as well as enough spelling mistakes to alter the description of the word or worsen global warming for that matter.

So what does the phrase “PDF DC” means?

I have absolutely no idea, according to the offender (people using SMS lingo should be punished for trying to be funny), it meant “Pretty damn funny, I’ve been disconnected”, well, nice riddle, unfortunately I don’t have time to play your games, in your world where your dictionary is only one page long, it might mean something, but when you send me a message, write properly, or I might have to ignore you and blame it on the encryption scheme you’re using (or a corrupted PDF)

Thank You!!! (and not TY, only people wearing crocs write like that)

[Errors & Omissions Excepted]

In the land of Telkom, three plus one equals five!

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

As an unhappy Telkom customer, I have the right to complain all I want without something being done about it, Telkom just takes a little longer before they’ll tell you they’re not going to do anything about it or they’ll deny their involvement. I guess Telkom is our punishment for starting a settlement in South Africa 400 years ago.

Besides the fact that they are amongst (if not the most) expensive telecoms company in the world, they can’t count. Let’s for a few moments ignore the fact that the majority shareholder in Telkom is the government (the corrupt cough, cough I mean circus themselves).

Now let’s compare buying bandwidth to buying toilet paper and let’s say a fraction of the sheets are missing from the purchased toilet paper, at first you don’t notice the missing sheets, especially when the number of missing sheets is negligible. Then the toilet paper company (aka Telkom) becomes greedy and starts to cut away more and more of the sheets on the toilet paper. Closer to the end of the month, you take a look at your toilet paper bill and see a substantial increase in toilet paper costs, but eventually you come to the conclusion that it must have been that house party from the previous weekend, maybe the chicken was bad or something.

You live in denial until one weekend you suddenly run out of toilet paper while on the job, no longer being able to live in denial, you cut your losses, go buy some new toilet paper and start counting the sheets when you suddenly start shaking with anger (as well as your head, in disbelief), how could they steal your toilet paper, you paid for it with hard earned cash.

Unfortunately the above scenario is not fictional, toilet paper companies have cheated thousands of business owners and millions of out-house owners in South Africa out of their hard earned cash by simply giving them less and less for their money while still claiming to give them the perks of extra softness and rash free paper,  Telkom just became part of the snatching club (let’s not mention Eskom, they’re in a league of their own)

Telkom capped me while I still had 20% of my cap left (and I’m not the only one) which meant loss of business, productivity and time which all translates to loss of income in some way or another. If you don’t believe me, take a look at these shocking stats taken at the end of the month, I reached my “5GB” cap in 3 weeks after using approximately 4GB of my cap, maybe the government need some other places to cut costs for their already over budget soccer stadiums for which they budgeted to go over the budget according to the minister (who’s name I can’t pronounce or spell) on SABC news last night. Since time is money, they can keep the 1GB they stole, it’s not worth chasing it (yet), but I’m adding up the monetary value until it’s worth taking them on.

Telkom Stealing

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