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| Phone spam |
| 05.21.04 (5:33 am) [edit] |
The LA Times is reporting today on industry efforts to create a directory of cell phone numbers. Industry analysts have been talking about this for months, and are warning that consumers will soon be seeing a lot more telemarketing calls and SMS spam on their cell phones.
Let me state for the record that I find telemarketing to be every bit as much of a nuisance as email spam. Worse, in some ways, because it wastes more of my time.
I registered my new home phone number with the national Do-Not-Call list the same day that I set up the account; however, it takes three months for the listing to take effect, and in the mean time, I have been deluged by calls and mail from all of the marketers who got my contact info from the public records of my new mortgage.
It also used to be illegal to use automated calling systems in the state of Georgia. But the industry has gotten that law overturned in recent years, so now you can't even request to have your number removed from a telemarketer's list without being forced to first listen through the entire recorded message.
And here's a question: Why do the phone companies charge a monthly fee for the so-called privelege of having an unlisted number? This is 2004; phone systems are now digital for the most part. Why can't the phone company just set a one-time flag on my record in their database that says "Don't publish" and be done with it? What kind of administrative problems do they have that they need to charge me $4 monthly, $48 annually, to address? Loss of anticipated revenue from phone directory sales, perhaps? Sorry, but that cost should not be passed on to the consumer!
Any way, the mobile telecommunications industry is now in a position to take on the mobile phone privacy issue in a way that works better than their wired predecessors. They are not constrained by the legacy standards and technology of our 100-year-old Bell phone networks. So here is my plea:
- Please make inclusion of mobile numbers in the directory an opt-in process rather than opt-out.
- Please explain the opt-in choice clearly to consumers during the process for setting up a new phone number.
- Please design your internal databases in a way that makes it easy to administer privacy choices. It seems counter-productive to have to run a second, 'Do-Not-Call', database, when you could simply record consumers' privacy preferences in the same place as their account information.
- If you must apply a charge to consumers to defray the costs of administering their privacy preferences, then please, make it a one-time fee and not a monthly charge.
Because I lived for 31 years without a cell phone, and I can do it again, easily, if the cell phone becomes more of a problem than a convenience.
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| Microsoft Virtual PC 2004: My two cents |
| 05.12.04 (6:37 am) [edit] |
Having used VM software in the past and found it to be a very useful tool for testing operating systems and software without having to purchase new hardware, I was quite pleased when February's MSDN shipment of CD's included Microsoft's new virtual machine product.
I have to say that so far, Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 has been a real disappointment, due to one critical flaw. When the window that the VM runs in loses focus — that is, when it's not the window on top because you are using other programs at the same time — its thread utilization slows to a crawl.
Installation of Windows 2003 Server, which was estimated to take 37 minutes, instead took 3 hours. I was only able to complete the installation by stopping all other work and clicking to bring the VM window to the front every time the screen saver started and it lost focus.
While this product is still of some use, since I don't have to erase my existing OS or swap hard drives to run my Windows 2003 test server on my existing PC, it still effectively takes my PC out of commission while the test server is in use. VMWare does not have the same problem, and for any production use, that's the product I would recommend.
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| Only in America |
| 05.12.04 (6:15 am) [edit] |
ZDNet is reporting that spammers Scott Richter and his company OptInRealBig have succeeded in getting a temporary restraining order against spam blacklist and complaint service Spamcop to prohibit them from blocking OptInRealBig's spam and from sending spam complaints without revealing the identity of the recipient.
And they had the chutzpah to misinterpret the CAN-SPAM act in support of their case.
I guess money talks and bullshit walks.
What is so wrong with the American legal system that everyone can agree that spam is a bad thing, and yet no one can make a law against it stand up in court?
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| SEO update |
| 05.11.04 (7:15 am) [edit] |
Well, Berry's Best Events has finally started to show up on Google, but it's ranked at number 196 for the phrase "Atlanta Wedding Planner". That's a pretty big difference from Yahoo!
I know that we're competing with search engine spam for these keywords, but there has to be more to it. I think that the text on the website probably needs to repeat these keywords, in context, more.
On past SEO projects, the marketing folks have always presented me with finished text before I ever had a chance to offer my advice. A lot of people still think of search engine optimization as some kind of arcane magic that goes on behind the scenes, involving hidden keywords and hacker tricks. The truth is that Google has gotten smart, and is now ranking pages primarily on - content! (What a concept.)
Today's marketing copy writer really needs to work hand-in-hand with the SEO consultant before the content of the website is presented to management and set in stone. Start with a keyword study to select which keywords or phrases to optimize with. Plan to optimize each page on the site for one or two of the selected key phrases - and if necessary, come up with a logical reason to add more pages if you don't have enough for all of the key phrases chosen. Finally, write the pages, using the key phrases multiple times, in context, within the content of the page.
I was consulted on the page content this time, but it was before I had done a keyword study, and I don't think I made it clear how important the content was to the search optimization. Next time, I'll need to be more assertive.
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| Phish Stick update |
| 05.11.04 (6:20 am) [edit] |
Spoofstick is now out of beta. Version 1.0 is available for Internet Explorer and Firefox.
On a side note, I think that this is the first time an external site has linked to this weblog. My little 'blog, which started as an experiment in search engine optimization, is starting to grow up!
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| Placebitrol - It works because you're crazy |
| 05.06.04 (5:39 am) [edit] |
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