St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Here’s a little video of an interview with someone from IBM that is supposed to be about how they manage their content. If you’ll watch the video you’ll notice he doesn’t speak on that directly he answers the question from a SEO point of view.

Please note that unless you company is IBM, Microsoft, or some other large multi-national mega-corporation this isn’t going to work for you. How can I tell? Well by the things Mr. Hunt doesn’t say and by the state of the mess that is large mega-sites like ibm.com and microsoft.com.

There is gold in his words, but when it comes to actually managing the content in a search engine and human friendly manner, Mr Hunt (and his clients websites) totally drop the ball.

In the war against free speech on the internet the Telcos are quietly winning. Here’s the latest blows:

• In December, Rogers Communications ( a Telecommunications and Internet Service provider), essentially hacked Google, adding a message to Google’s home page that appeared to it’s customers that where getting close to the ISP’s bandwidth limit.
• Comcast has admitted to blocking file-sharing traffic. link
• Comcast is discovered to blocking non file-sharing software as well. link
•      – BTW, the methods they use are illegal (packet forging and/or spoofing) are not just illegal but felonies (each act) under federal law.
•      – Ironicly, comcast reported this story on their own site, I quess they are proud of their censorship efforts
• Time Warner/AOL blocked e-mails from and to subscribers that were critical of thier “pay-to-send” (a method that ensure that spam will reach AOL users for a fee) email plan. link
• Verizon prevented the abortion rights group Naral Pro-Choice America from getting a “short code” that would allow the group to send text messages to supporters. They claim they have a right to block anything they’d like.link
• Comcast blocks other companies VOIP traffic a few days before they begin offering their own VOIP services for twice as much as others. link
• Telus (an ISP in Canada) blocked 766 websites in an effort to block one Pro-Union web site during a lock-out by the company. link. NOTE: This is a very extremely sloppy and lazy way to block one site.
• AT&T cut off the webcast of a Pearl Jam concert just when lead singer Eddie Veder was critical of U.S. President George Bush. link

The Telco’s argument in justification of all this is twofold as is their battle plan:

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Click Forensics has released their latest report on Click Fraud. Click Fraud effects people and businesses who buy “pay per click” advertisements on web sites and search engines like google. It becomes fraud when:

• It’s not a human doing the clicking
• It’s human who is doing the clicking but his or her only intend is to cause the advertiser to be charged for the click, not because they are interested in the content advertised

The two most common sources of click fraud are competitors who want to see your budget eaten up without any legitimate customers going to your site. They also get the added benefit of being able to bid on those keyphrases for much less money once your budget is blown. This is by far the most common type of click fraud.
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