We’ve long argued that you can treat your website as a business expense, or as a business investment.  If you look at it as a picture, then its an expense.  If you look at all the aspects that define how the site will perform, it becomes an investment - hopefully a profitable one!

Look at your site as an Employee!

I’ve just thought of a new angle - consider your site to be another employee for your business.  You want it to work for you and make money for you, don’t you? So…

• Find an employment agency
  • Meaning your web development company
• They’ll GROW your perfect employee
  • When you hire an employee, you have to pick one from all the applicants
  • Imagine you could grow one based on your specialised requirements!
• Put your new employee to work
  • Your vat-grown employee can take on any persona you define, to better represent your business,
  • Can work tirelessly 24 hours a day,
  • Is the perfect salesperson to attract and field initial enquiries,
  • Will follow your instructions to convert enquiries to sales!

How cool would a vat-grown employee be? One who can do all of the above?  One who you pay to have grown, who doesn’t ask for a weekly wage to keep working for you?

Well, that can be your website!

But I missed every third word.  I’m not great with accents to begin with, and the amount of static in the line was not helping.  Then the line cut out for 5 seconds.  We tried to continue, and the line cut out again.  So I hung up.

Kevin called back, and I explained that I’m not going to trust my electricity needs to a company that can’t make a phone call.  I’ve since googled the company, and couldn’t find any mention of it.  Also not sure how they obtained a list of customers belonging to a competitor (my current provider), or how they got my billing history.  I’m certainly not impressed.

So, do you know how well your company being represented?

If you think about it, you could come up with all sorts of amusing ways this proposal could have taken place. Did he gift-wrap his “p0rn star” instrument in a ribbon? Was there a piercing involved?

I leave you with:

Brendon writes on Tailored about how Ugg Australia was driving his Online Ugg Boot Store out of business by providing a higher quality of boot at lower prices, with better customer support to match.

From my point of view, this has quite an upside. Christmas is typically the busiest time of year for Ugg Boot retailers - Americans and Europeans are feeling the cold, and Ugg Boots make great Christmas gifts. And this year, I don’t have to field phone calls from Ugg Boot customers! Merry Christmas to me!

Dear xxx,

My Name is xxx, I am an Software Engineer, and i belongs to Kerala, India.  while i was searching for an article, I just came to know about you through the website www.tailored.com.au , So we both are working in the same field. I would like to know, will you be able to share friendship with me. I expect positive results from you and look forward to speaking with you.

regards
xxx

This email came to my work account, which is listed on tailored.com.au. I thought it was kind of wierd, and a little creepy.  But the other staff here have received the same email.

This appears to be a more targeted approach to phishing.  The phisher has located an ‘about me’ page, found my email address, and customised his email to target me.  (Somewhat poorly, I might add).  Still, this is a little frightening - There’s a wealth of information online about all of us web citizens, and its available to anyone who takes the time to look for it.

This is a little scary.  Its incredible how many people still get taken in by Nigerian scams, even today.  More personalised phishing emails will surely sucker even more people in.

I found a few articles discussing this issue, and linking back to Eoghan O’Brien. His fix (defer=”defer” on the javascript) didn’t help me though.

My issue was with SWFobject. Long story short, I ended up having to do this:

<script type="text/javascript">
window.addEvent('load', function()  {
var so = new  SWFObject('flvplayer.swf','mpl','240','200','7');
...
so.write('player');
});
</script>

Yes, I use mootools. Instead of doing <script src=”#” defer=”defer”> I was able to defer the EXECUTION of the script instead, by adding it to the onLoad event sequence.

Still don’t know why it works, but now my page opens in Internet Explorer (IE6 and IE7, also Avant Browser)

…it’s SEO, which are the scum of the earth, just behind spammers.

[Above] comment is over generalized but SEO’s are known to hurt the internet experience time and time again. If SE’s didn’t have to fight SEO’s just trying to trick people into making them a quick buck imagine how much more useful a simple google search would become

[Note: I bookmarked that and wrote some notes a while back.  The comments I refer to seem to have been removed since then.]

Reminds me of a similar situation, going back a few years, concerning “hacker” vs “cracker”. Originally, hackers were those who hacked software and systems together. They were curious, inventive - not evil. But its a very negative label nowadays, with the inference that hackers are out to cause damage. When this trend started, old-school hackers tried to get the label ‘cracker’ applied to their more malicious counterparts, but failed to do so. Media reports were always saying “Computer hackers broke into such and such”, and the war was over.

I think those of us in the web industry are facing the same battle. To be a Search Engine Optimizer seems to be the same as being a dirty rotten spammer in some eyes. To my mind, this is just plain wrong. The true search engine optimizer works on the following principles:

• Ensure the site is crawlable by engines (missing pages, broken links, javascript menus - all of which are bad for other reasons too, such as limiting a visually-impaired user with a screen-reader from using the site)
• Getting a good balance with respect to keyword density on pages (generally meaning to remove the non-essential stuff from an article - always a good writing tip anyway! Remember English 101? Tell the reader what you are going to say, then say it, then tell them what you just said.)
• Setting relevant page titles, putting headings in the right places (Titles help when users bookmark pages, and headings are great for breaking up content into readable and digestible chunks)
• Making sure that the site has plenty of internal links (when you link from one page to another - good for your users if it helps them find related information on your site about the topic of interest)
• Getting inbound links from other sites (Helps promote your content so that others can find your pages. If its valuable content, there is nothing wrong with helping people find it!)

Some “black hat” SEO’s will ugly things, like comment-spam on blogs and forums (which counts as inbound links), creating gateway pages, using hidden text, and all sorts of other dodgy behavior. For example, in the digg article, one user points out that the submitter’s user account, and the first few commenter’s user accounts were all created at the same time (yesterday). The obvious conclusion is that the submitter created some fake accounts to vote for his article, raising the odds of it getting to the front-page of digg. In my view, this indicates that the submitter realizes his article lacks in value, so he must try to game the system to get the results he wants.

Sometimes optimizers use black hat techniques because they feel they’ll get a more immediate payoff. Other times, they use black-hat SEO techniques because its the only way to get a site ranked if it has nothing of value. The latter reason is very common, and is what really harms the internet experience.

So those of us working the Wild Wild Web will soon have to find ourselves new job titles, if we cannot find a way to help those on the outside to distinguish between black hat and white hat SEO.

Subject: man, who filmed this thing?
If your dad sees this video you made, he is going to kill you. Go look at it: http://www.youtube.com/……

Then the youtube link goes off to a IP-based website, no doubt to install some spyware or something. I certainly didn’t click it.

Can you imagine how many kids will see this email, think “Oh shit, who had a camera at that last party…” and click the link?

The ACCC promotes competition and fair trade in the market place to benefit consumers, business and the community. It also regulates national infrastructure services. Its primary responsibility is to ensure that individuals and businesses comply with the Commonwealth competition, fair trading and consumer protection laws.

It serves to enforce the idea of “fair trading” and it covers all aspects of the marketplace, including customers, retailers, and wholesalers. If I felt a business was doing false advertising, or was denying me a refund, I could report them to the ACCC.

Now, the ACCC has filed suit against Google, Google Ireland, and Google Australia. Oh, and the local Trading Post. From the ACCC website:

The ACCC is alleging that Trading Post contravened sections 52 and 53(d) of the Trade Practices Act 1974 in 2005 when the business names “Kloster Ford” and “Charlestown Toyota” appeared in the title of Google sponsored links to Trading Post’s website. Kloster Ford and Charlestown Toyota are Newcastle car dealerships who compete against Trading Post in automotive sales.

Seems like the Trading Post bought ads that LOOKED like they were advertising Kloster and Charlestown, when in fact they pointed to the Trading Post’s site.

Read more at The Australian. Also see Slashdot discussion.

The Trading Post has settled, and the ACCC is now going after Google for displaying the ads.

If this suit holds up it will set a precedent for very heavy ad monitoring responsibility on the part of all search engines, not just Google.

For clarification, note that the ACCC is not suing for money (aside from costs). I’m not exactly sure what they want - there’s a list of demands on the ACCC website, not all of which I understand. It seems like they want Google to say sorry, and not to let it happen again. This would include better separation of organic and paid listings, and implementing some kind of systems for Pete’s Red Widgets cannot appear when someone searches for Fred’s Red Widgets.