The revolutions that swept the Middle East in 2011 surprised and captivated the world. Brutal regimes that had been in power for decades were overturned by an irrepressible mass of freedom seekers. Now, one of the figures who emerged during the Egyptian uprising tells the riveting inside story of what happened and shares the keys to unleashing the power of crowds.

Wael Ghonim was a little-known, thirty-year-old Google executive in the summer of 2010 when he anonymously launched a Facebook page to protest the death of one Egyptian man at the hands of security forces. The page’s following expanded quickly and moved from online protests to a nonconfrontational movement.

The youth of Egypt made history: they used social media to schedule a revolution. The call went out to more than a million Egyptians online, and on January 25, 2011, Cairo’s Tahrir Square resounded with calls for change. Yet just as the revolution began in earnest, Ghonim was captured and held for twelve days of brutal interrogation. After he was released, he gave a tearful speech on national television, and the protests grew more intense. Four days later, the president of Egypt was gone.

The lessons Ghonim draws will inspire each of us. He saw the road to Tahrir Square built not by any one person, but by the people. In Revolution 2.0, we can all be heroes.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Wael Ghonim

Wael Ghonim was born in Cairo and grew up in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, earning a degree from Cairo University in 2004 and an MBA from the American University in Cairo in 2007.  He joined Google in 2008, rising to become Head of Marketing for Google Middle East and North Africa.  He is currently on sabbatical from Google to launch an NGO supporting education and technology in Egypt.

Editorial Review

As the head of marketing for Google Middle East and North Africa, Ghonim was so outraged by the State Security’s beating to death of a young Egyptian named Khaled Mohamed Said that he created the Facebook page Kolona Khaled Said (“We Are All Khaled Said”). The website helped sparked the revolution ending Hosni Mubarak’s presidency. Here, in sometimes hour-by-hour detail and with ample and extensive quotes from Facebook, the author recounts the events from its appearance in June 2010 to February 2011, when Mubarak stepped down. He also documents his own transformation from passive critic of the Mubarak regime to motivated activist whose “computer keyboard had become a machine gun, firing bullets with every keystroke.” The response to his page was immediate, and the numbers grew rapidly, establishing the site as a major voice of the Internet generation. From reading its posts, people realized that they were not alone in their fears and frustrations, and they began to add their comments, contribute content share in decisions about what actions might be taken. Ghonim credits the Tunisian revolution with finally giving young Egyptians the confidence to take to the streets. His own fears about concealing his identity were justified: He was arrested, blindfolded and handcuffed and interrogated in isolation for 12 days. Ghonim’s Facebook page was not alone, however. Hundreds of other sites were launched to collect and disseminate news and images, and he credits these and Al Jazeera satellite TV and CNN with keeping the story of the Egyptian revolution alive. Questions remain: Is the revolution really over, or is another one against Egypt’s entrenched military just beginning. If so, what role will social media play this time? – Kirkus Reviews

‘Revolution 2.0′: How Social Media Toppled A Dictator

NPR Book Review – February 8, 2012 (Excerpt)

When thousands of Egyptians began to gather in Tahrir Square in preparation for the planned Jan. 25, 2011, uprising, then-President Hosni Mubarak’s beleaguered regime responded with familiar brutality and thuggery. And then, it made a tactical error: it clamped down on Facebook and Twitter.

“The regime’s decision to block these two websites,” writes Internet activist Wael Ghonim in his book, Revolution 2.0,“was a grave mistake.” The Egyptian people sensed desperation in the state’s actions — and proof of their own strength.

In the early hours of that “Night of Rage,” Ghonim wrote on the Facebook page he managed, “It is the beginning of the end.”

In Revolution 2.0, a memoir-cum-manifesto, Ghonim offers an insider’s account of the days of anticipation and the exhilarating release that came with Mubarak’s departure — as well as his own trajectory from marketing executive to one of the most recognizable faces of the revolution.

During the buildup to the protests, Ghonim had been living in Dubai, working at Google’s Middle East office. When Khaled Said, a 28-year-old man from Alexandria, was killed by two Egyptian security officers and a photograph of his brutalized face began circulating on the Internet, Ghonim seized upon it as an opportunity to call for an end to corruption and torture at the hands of the government. He proposed a protest on Jan. 25 through a Facebook page called Kullena Khaled Said (“We Are All Khaled Said”). [Read the full article...]

A look inside the Egyptian revolution

The Chicago Tribune – February 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

Wael Ghonim is an unlikely rebel. Born in Egypt in 1980, he began working his first Web job while studying at Cairo University, then moved to the U.S. (where he married an American) and eventually became Google’s top marketing representative for the Middle East, based in Dubai. His opposition to Hosni Mubarak’s regime was far down on his personal list of interests. But it was there. Waiting.

And when the tide began rising in 2010, Ghonim found himself leading and being propelled by it, which earned him nearly two weeks of detention and torture by the Mubarak regime, and hero status among the legions agitating for Mubarak’s fall.

Ghonim’s emergence as an accidental insurrectionist forms the heart of his memoir, “Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater Than the People in Power.” It’s an engaging read, and it offers a sharply detailed look from the inside of an uprising that owed almost as much to social media connections as it did to anti-Mubarak passions.

One of the book’s more remarkable elements is Ghonim’s depiction of how quickly timidity and resignation morphed into a mass movement — one that toppled a dictator and whose end has yet to be determined as doubts grow that the Egyptian military (whose neutrality during the uprising helped propel Mubarak’s fall) will cede control to the people. [Read the full article...]

Spring Awakening - How an Egyptian Revolution Began on Facebook

The New York Times Book Review – February 17, 2012 (Excerpt)

In the embryonic, ever evolving era of social media — when milestones come by the day, if not by the second — June 8, 2010, has secured a rightful place in history. That was the day Wael Ghonim, a 29-year-old Google marketing executive, was browsing Facebook in his home in Dubai and found a startling image: a photo­graph of a bloodied and disfigured face, its jaw broken, a young life taken away. That life, he soon learned, had belonged to Khaled Mohamed Said, a 28-year-old from Alexandria who had been beaten to death by the Egyptian police.

At once angered and animated, the Egyptian-­born Ghonim went online and created a Facebook page. “Today they killed Khaled,” he wrote. “If I don’t act for his sake, tomorrow they will kill me.” It took a few moments for Ghonim to settle on a name for the page, one that would fit the character of an increasingly personalized and politically galvanizing Internet. He finally decided on “Kullena Khaled Said” — “We Are All Khaled Said.”

“Khaled Said was a young man just like me, and what happened to him could have happened to me,” Ghonim writes in “Revolution 2.0,” his fast-paced and engrossing new memoir of political awakening. “All young Egyptians had long been oppressed, enjoying no rights in our own homeland.” [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

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Social networks are the defining cultural movement of our time, empowering us in constantly evolving ways. We can all now be reporters, alerting the world to breaking news of a natural disaster; we can participate in crowd-sourced scientific research; and we can become investigators, helping the police solve crimes. Social networks have even helped to bring down governments. But they have also greatly accelerated the erosion of our personal privacy rights, and any one of us could become the victim of shocking violations at any time. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest nation in the world; but while that nation appears to be a comforting small town, in which we socialize with our selective group of friends, it and the rest of the Web is actually a lawless frontier of hidden and unpredictable dangers. The same power of information that can topple governments can destroy a person’s career or marriage.

As leading expert on social networks and privacy Lori Andrews shows, through groundbreaking in-depth research and a host of stunning stories of abuses, as we work and chat and shop and date (and even sometimes have sex) over the Web, we are opening ourselves up to increasingly intrusive, relentless, and anonymous surveillance—by employers, schools, lawyers, the police, and aggressive data aggregator services that compile an astonishing amount of information about us and sell it to any and all takers.

She reveals the myriad ever more sophisticated techniques being used to track us and discloses how routinely colleges and employers reject applicants due to personal information searches; robbers use postings about vacations to target homes for break-ins; lawyers readily find information to use against us in divorce and child custody cases; and at one school, the administrators actually used the cameras on students’ school-provided laptops to spy on them in their homes. Some mobile Web devices are even being programmed to listen in on us and feed data services a steady stream of information about where we are and what we are doing. And even if we use the best services to get our personal data removed from the Web, in a short time almost all that data is restored.

As Andrews persuasively argues, the legal system cannot be counted on to protect us—in the thousands of cases brought to trial by those whose rights have been violated, judges have most often ruled against them. That is why in addition to revealing the dangers and providing the best expert advice about protecting ourselves, Andrews proposes that we must all become supporters of a Constitution for the Web, which she has drafted and introduces in this book. Now is the time to join her and take action—the very future of privacy is at stake.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Lori Andrews

Lori Andrews is a law professor, a public interest lawyer and mystery novelist. She’s taught at Princeton, written for a television legal drama, and advised governments around the world about emerging technologies. Now she’s focusing on how social networks are changing our lives, for good and for ill.

Lori started her consumer activism when she was seven and her Ken doll went bald. Her letter to Mattel got action. She’s been fighting for people’s rights ever since.

A professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law, Lori frequently appears on television, including on Oprah, 60 Minutes, Good Morning America, and Nightline. The American Bar Association Journal calls her “a lawyer with a literary bent who has the scientific chops to rival any CSI investigator.”

Editorial Review

Unnerving narrative about the misuse of personal online information—without our knowledge—to track, judge and harm us in innumerable aspects of our lives.

Social-network executives often dismiss online privacy concerns: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it,” said Sun Microsystems’ Scott McNealy. But the constitutional freedoms of millions of people posting personal data on Facebook and other networks are violated routinely, and the law has not kept up with the new technology, writes lawyer Andrews (Institute for Science, Law and Technology/Illinois Institute of Technology; Immunity, 2008, etc.). Noting that social networks make their profits on users’ data, she describes the multibillion-dollar industry of data aggregators who mine online data for the advertising industry, often “weblining” people, denying them certain opportunities due to observations about their digital selves. Most users have no idea how much information is being collected about them: “People have a misplaced trust that what they post is private.” The results can be devastating: A Georgia teacher posted a photo showing her drinking a glass of Guinness at an Irish brewery, and she was forced to resign after the photo was e-mailed anonymously to her school superintendent. After seeing a mother’s MySpace page showing her posing provocatively in lingerie, a judge awarded custody of her young children to her husband. “Virtually every interaction a person has in the offline world can be tainted by social network information,” writes the author, who proposes creating a “Social Network Constitution” to govern our lives online. Her governing principles would protect against police searches of social networks without probable cause, require social networks to post conspicuous Miranda-like privacy warnings and set rules for the use or collecting of user information. – Kirkus Reviews

 The Dangers of Sharing

The New York Times Book Review – January 27, 2012 (Excerpt)

It may surprise anyone under 16, but even before the advent of social networking we faced threats to our privacy. A hospital accidentally releasing patient records or a shady marketing firm engaging in Stasi-like data collection — such violations were substantial enough and disturbing enough to make the evening news. Today, however, the “death of privacy” is more like death by a thousand cuts: information leaks out slowly and invisibly, and so routinely that we’re hardly shocked when it does. Internet companies, which use the word “sharing” almost as a euphemism for “oops,” like to pretend these lapses are normal, even natural. If Mark Zuckerberg’s private photos are up for grabs (as when a recent glitch exposed his Facebook account), what can the rest of us expect?

Such sloppy reasoning is under fire in “I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy,” by Lori Andrews, a law professor and bioethicist whose previous books include “The Clone Age” and “Body Bazaar.” For Andrews, the Internet is a natural subject. She ventures far beyond the social networks of her subtitle to consider the ramifications of search engines, data mining, targeted “behavioral” advertising and other technologies. Likewise, she covers a range of issues beyond privacy, including discrimination in the workplace and free speech in schools.

Some of her questions are challenging and potentially explosive. Is it valid to expect judges to refrain from “friending” lawyers they work with? Should sitting jurors be prevented from using social media? If a parent once wrote on Twitter that he or she didn’t want children, should that statement be admissible in custody hearings? [Read the full article...]

VAMPIRE ASCENDING
by Lorelei Bell

Exciting Hunt For A Vampire Serial Killer in Chicago

Sabrina Strong is a Touch Clairvoyant who knows a secret. She knows her mother was turned into a vampire when Sabrina was ten. Now that she is grown up, a powerful magnate in the Chicago business world hires her to reveal the identity of who relentlessly murders vampires in his ultra-modern stronghold of a hotel. [Read More...]

Vampire Ascending is now available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

It is a sad fact of a blogger’s life that we all depend too much on Google’s daily mood when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). One day, Google decides that content aggregation is bad and punishes the big websites with lower rankings. And yes, most of these websites are bad for business, but there is also the occasional collateral damage in form of the hobby blogger who fits the “bad” parameters out of pure coincidence.

Add to this situation that the hobby blogger usually doesn’t have the time to research Google’s flavor of the day and adjust the blog accordingly. After all, there are entire businesses dedicated to the subject. And no, there is no way to step totally or even partly out of Google’s mighty shadow, but there are a few actions, not specifically designed for Google,  you can take to ease the pain. Ironically, though, these actions will also satisfy the Google search engine, but these are actions designed to drive visitors to your website who are not necessarily using the Google search engine, but find you through other references.

1. Use social networking to its full capacity. Open accounts (unless you have already done so) with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and even more. Whenever you publish a new post, post also a brief description plus hyperlink on each network. Over time, you will create a “followership” that guarantees a certain level of web traffic.

2. Sign up at digg.com and reddit.com and post frequently, i.e. whenever you post a new article. I, personally, found that reddit.com acts sometimes irrational by telling me that I already posted an entry less than x minutes ago (they try to prevent automated data blasts) or that the entered Captcha code is wrong, even though neither case is true.

3. Don’t underestimate the power of online press releases! There are several free services; just google “free press release.” Take the time to write a release about once a month, even if you think that your blog is not news-worthy. It will not only drive traffic to your website; it will also create links, and search engines like links.

4. Regardless of political affiliation, read the Huffington Post and write comments wherever appropriate, and don’t forget to reference your website. Again, it will drive traffic and create links. I had one post that was mentioned in a comment on the Huffington Post, and my web traffic soared into unbelievable dimensions for several weeks. The same works for other online newspapers (e.g. the Washington Post) but the Huff Post is currently the best online place to place comments.

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There’s a definite science and a definite art to making websites rank #1, which is SEO, or search engine optimization. When it’s done right, your business gets found by thousands of new people daily — and secures you new levels of online profits and success.

Just the other day I talked to a business owner who complained about a competitor’s success with improving web ranking. As a matter of fact, the competitor had managed to at least triple the traffic to his website and that within a period of less than three months. The only conclusion I had was that the competitor had started a well-prepared campaign, maybe even with the help of an SEO consultant.

“What is it that they do differently than us?” asked the business owner. A lot.

“Their website is not bigger than ours.” Yes, it is.

“We update frequently.” One post once a week is not enough.

“Our guy is on top of things.” Yes, he also takes care of documentation and quality control.

“We spend good money with Google Ads.” Take the money and hire that consultant.

Okay, I admit, the last item may be controversial, but I stand to my statement. A few years back I was in a position where I could spent $1,500 a month on Google Ads. Some particular keywords imperative to our business turned out to be very expensive, i.e. at times we paid up to $5 for one click. In some cases the recommended amount was $10 per click, but in such cases we declined and basically lost that keyword to the (richer) competition.

After a year or so of spending that kind of money, I stopped Google Ads entirely – without any noticeable impact on the business – and hired a person to revamp our website entirely. Guess what, our site appeared regularly on the first search page, and that circumstance does more for our business than Google Ads.

However, after about two years of good results – I am purposely neglecting the impact of the general economic situation – our rankings started to suffer.

Develop A Strategy

A new strategy was necessary. First, we started to analyze our website using one of the software tools available in the market (see bottom of this page). We found several small problems with search engine optimization (page description and page header too long, business name in the page header, etc.). In addition, we used a keyword analyzer software to optimize the keyword quality of our pages.

However, while SEO is important, there are other ways of promoting your website. SEO can turn out to be a science that will require that special and expensive consultant, but there are some very effective measures that your part-time webmaster can handle as well.

Create A Corporate Blog

Besides technical details to support SEO, you need to implement what I consider the three most important milestones for a successful website: 1. Content, 2. Content, and 3. Content. With adding content comes another vital action: frequent updating.

If you feel that your website represents your service or products sufficiently – there is only so much that you can document – you should consider the installation of a corporate blog. That blog can be part of your existing website or can be created from scratch with a blog system (e.g. WordPress). An external blog would provide an additional link to your main website.

Write about customer projects, trade shows, anecdotes, etc. Give your associates and/or employees access to the blog. And yes, any new post to the blog can be monitored by an administrator. I have heard concerns that low quality writing might destroy a business’ reputation, a point that I wouldn’t take too seriously. A blog, surprisingly, can also help to stimulate your employees. Everybody wants to be a blogger these days, and if you lead them in the right direction, it will help your business in multiple aspects.

Press Releases

Another activity that we had neglected were press releases. You hear and read a ton of information about SEO, but SEO is not the only solution. Press releases, when properly written (See http://www.send2press.com/articles/cs-howto.shtml), can create more attention to your website than any SEO. Just to list a few online press release services (some of them free):

• Free press release: prlog.com. Highly recommended. I usually get a good number of “views”, up to several thousands, depending on popularity of the posted topic.

• Free press release: openPR.com. It’s free, but I found it somewhat cumbersome to place releases.

• Paid ($30) press release: free-press-release.com. As the web site name indicates, they also do it for free, but paying “improves” your chances of being read. My experience is that there is a difference in exposure, but in all consequence, the $30 I paid was not worth the result. And if you don’t pay, it’s even worse. At times I got five views over several months, while I had several hundreds at other services.

• Paid ($80) press release: PRWeb.com. The web site promises you heaven, but the number of “views” is not necessarily higher than other, free services. Also, the costs per click are relatively high. Nevertheless, I use prweb.com on a regular basis in addition to the free services. Their ranking is usually higher than other services, meaning their link to your blog is of higher quality.

• Paid ($49) press release: 24-7Press-Release.com. Costs per click (in my experience as low as $0.11) are relatively low; they provide a good number of views.

• Free press release: i-newswire.com. No stats unless you pay. Costs are reasonable.

• Free press release: pr9.net – It’s free, but they don’t provide any stats.

Press releases are not only effective to lead traffic to your website within shortest time; they also create hyperlinks to your website, and link-building is another pillar of SEO.

Now, just for the heck of it, let’s compare the per-click costs between Googles Ads and press releases. As an example, you pay $80 for a press release, and you get a total of 800 views (not an unreasonable number), your resulting cost-per-click is 10 cents. Add to this that these views are not “congested,” meaning nobody but you gains from clicking on the hyperlinks. There are no affiliates making money per click by hiring people in Russia and Africa (Sorry, no discrimination meant; it’s an unfortunate fact). All in all, press releases provide an incredibly higher click quality.

Link Building

It is difficult to determine how many websites link to yours. Every online service you use will produce different numbers. I recommend sticking with one of them (like Alexa.com) to monitor your ranking and number of links. At least you can see a tendency.

It is said that link-building is very important for your SEO strategy, but it can also be damaging depending on the quality of the website that points to yours. It is not a good match when the other website promotes ladies’ fashion and you sell automobile parts. And yes, there are software tools that help you to determine websites that are similar to yours, and they help you to contact the corresponding webmasters (See bottom of this page).

Social Networking

I have heard of too many business owners complaining “I don’t need to know every time when somebody goes to the bathroom.” This is just a major misconception of social networks, and how they can be used to promote your website. Yes, you should have a business account with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Tumblr, and others, and use them instead of an ineffective email-newsletter. Post any new post on your corporate blog, press release references, new product announcements, etc. There is no guarantee which one of these services will work for you, but damned if yo do; damned if you don’t. It will help eventually to increase attention to your website, and they do (indirectly) create hyperlinks to your website.

Youtube

I am in a position where I conduct technical seminars several times a year all over the US and Canada. And, of course, I use a PowerPoint presentation. The most difficult thing about these seminars is to get a sufficient number of people to assemble at the same location at the same time. With the help of the Internet, namely Youtube, anybody interested in the subject can log on to our website (or Youtube) and watch the presentation at any location and any time they like.

I use a software, Camtasia, to record my presentation, video and audio. It was only a small investment compared to the travel costs I accumulate per year.

Of course, if you don’t have a PowerPoint presentation handy, but would like to promote your service or product, you need to be inventive. After all, a presence on Youtube may be just the thing that separates you from the competition, and it would be a major mistake to underestimate the popularity of Youtube.

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There’s a definite science and a definite art to making websites rank #1, which is SEO, or search engine optimization. When it’s done right, your business gets found by thousands of new people daily — and secures you new levels of online profits and success.

Finally, this morning I got a feedback from Google Buzz saying:

Warning: Google Buzz was officially deprecated on October 14, 2011; it will be shut off completely on or after November 14, 2011. For more information, please see this announcement.

The message on the Google Blog does not explain why they will close Google Buzz, but here it is:

A fall sweep

10/14/2011 10:03:00 AM

We aspire to build great products that really change people’s lives, products they use two or three times a day. To succeed you need real focus and thought—thought about what you work on and, just as important, what you don’t work on. It’s why we recently decided to shut down some products, and turn others into features of existing products.

Here’s the latest update on what’s happening:

• Code Search, which was designed to help people search for open source code all over the web, will be shut down along with the Code Search API on January 15, 2012.
• In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+. While people obviously won’t be able to create new posts after that, they will be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile, and download it using Google Takeout.
• Jaiku, a product we acquired in 2007 that let users send updates to friends, will shut down on January 15, 2012. We’ll be working to enable users to export their data from Jaiku.
• Several years ago, we gave people the ability to interact socially on iGoogle. With our new focus on Google+, we will remove iGoogle’s social features on January 15, 2012. iGoogle itself, and non-social iGoogle applications, will stay as they are.
• The University Research Program for Google Search, which provides API access to our search results for a small number of approved academic researchers, will close on January 15, 2012.

In addition, later today the Google Labs site will shut down, and as previously announced, Boutiques.com and the former Like.com websites will be replaced by Google Product Search.

Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past. We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+. Our users expect great things from us; today’s announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome.

Posted by Bradley Horowitz, Vice President, Product

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• SEO PowerSuite (Professional License) – Buy It Now.
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• SEO PowerSuite (Professional License) – Product Information

There’s a definite science and a definite art to making websites rank #1, which is SEO, or search engine optimization. When it’s done right, your business gets found by thousands of new people daily — and secures you new levels of online profits and success.

Yet again, it appears I needed that slap in the face and re-confirm my experience.

Let’s have a look at the numbers of my last AdWords campaign: Between August 7, 2011 and September 1, 2011 I paid $234.27 (minus $100 per coupon) for a “whooping” 321 clicks! Compare that to 40,000+ visitors with 80,000+ page views per month. I got all this through good content, tons of content, frequent updating, and simple SEO. Also consider the percentage of fraudulent clicks that help make money for the advertising websites. Google tells you it’s only a very low percentage. I dare say that the actual percentage is far higher, maybe even beyond ten percent. Google is good when it comes to detecting clicking fraud, but eliminating them takes away from their profit, and, after all, they can’t just catch everything.

And yes, I could have gotten a lot more clicks (= visitors) had I spent more money with Google. Their support people contacted my several times per email, and they were sure, they had some very valuable tips for me. All these valuable tips, mind you, will always result in spending more money. Even if the quality of my selected keywords was not high, I still managed to get the maximum possible clicks for my money.

If I took the before-mentioned numbers, and I had the goal of increasing the number of visitors by, let’s say, ten percent (= 4,000) I would have to invest almost $3,000 per month!

And no, I am not willing to spend thousands of dollars to create more traffic. I’d rather spend some more time updating my website. Visitors flow in without Google AdWords. And with a hypothetical annual budget of $36,000 (I wish I had it…) I would still spend my money more wisely.

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Boiled Peanuts

A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents.  In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding.

Then Paul meets Bronwyn, a counselor who is lovely, independent and blind. She has inherited her Aunt Phyllis’ house and is newly arrived in town. When Paul first sees Bronwyn at church, he knows he wants to be part of her life. As the mystery of Aunt Phyllis unfolds, Bronwyn and Paul become more deeply involved as they learn about Phyllis’ secrets and how they relate to Bronwyn and her past, but Paul’s peeping ways may ruin it all. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Veteran journalists Kovach and Rosenstiel (The Elements of Journalism) begin their intelligent and well-written guidebook by assuring readers this is not unfamiliar territory. The printing press, the telegraph, radio, and television were once just as unsettling and disruptive as today’s Internet, blogs, and Twitter posts. But the rules have changed. The gatekeepers of information are disappearing. Everyone must become editors assuming the responsibility for testing evidence and checking sources presented in news stories, deciding what’s important to know, and whether the material is reliable and complete. Utilizing a set of systemic questions that the authors label “the way of skeptical knowing,” Kovach and Rosenstiel provide a roadmap for maintaining a steady course through our messy media landscape. As the authors entertainingly define and deconstruct the journalism of verification, assertion, affirmation, and interest group news, readers gain the analytical skills necessary for understanding this new terrain. “The real information gap in the 21st century is not who has access to the Internet and who does not. It is the gap between people who have the skills to create knowledge and those who are simply in a process of affirming preconceptions without growing and learning.” – Publishers Weekly

What if the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island occurred today, in the age of the Internet, talk radio, and hyperpartisan “news” programs? Journalists Kovach and Rosenstiel examine that frightening prospect in this book that looks at how Americans will sort out news and information as journalism struggles in the Internet era. After offering historical perspective on the way news gathering has worked and its current state of uncertainty, the authors offer sound lessons on the “tradecraft of verification” necessary for Americans to sort out truth from vested opinion. They offer examples of how reporters typically verify information in contexts from covering wars to politics. They break down the process by emphasizing the kind of information content (news versus commentary); its completeness, source, and tested evidence; and, finally, what readers are learning from what they read. Applying their criteria, the authors analyze several instances of news reporting, commentary, talk-show haggling, and blogging to discern how readers, listeners, and viewers can sort through the cloud of information. Kovach and Rosenstiel combine journalism and civics in this valuable and insightful resource to help Americans adapt to an era that demands that readers become their own editors and news aggregators. –Vanessa Bush, Booklist

Review

Blur is more than a road map for people to attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff in the amber waves of information that surround and overwhelm us. The authors take us on a wild ride through space and time to decipher the ways in which we ingest the information we need to make decisions that could effect our daily lives and that of our planet. They tell us how we’ve evolved to this point of cyberoverload, how we’ve trampled the gatekeepers who once kept us honest, how we’ve popularized the media to the point of no return, what all of that means for the future of democracy, and what we can do about it. It is not a pretty picture, but it’s compelling and thought-provoking. If only this book were required reading for everyone over twelve, we might see more light at the end of the tunnel.

But the crowning achievement of Blur is that the authors have presented such a complex yet cohesive portrait of where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going without committing the mortal sin of nonfiction: boring the reader. With a generous use of anecdotal material and case studies, they bring their topics to life in a way that makes this more than an important book, it’s a damn good read. – Craig Buck, Amazon.Com Customer Review

As Media Lines ‘Blur,’ We All Become Editors

NPR Book Review – September 1, 2011 (Excerpt)

For years now, media watchers have warned that the dwindling popularity of traditional media would change how we follow the news. They’ve predicted that news consumers would need to learn the difference between a credible source and an interested party; where facts stop and spin begins; and what solid journalism is really made of.

What conventional wisdom didn’t provide were the tools to ferret out the truth amid the barrage of content on radio, television, the Internet and in newspapers.

In Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload, Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach try to provide some of those tools — many of which overlap with those traditionally used by journalists.

Rosenstiel tells NPR’s Neal Conan that while consumers need to be better equipped to vet information, news outlets should also adapt their reporting practices to provide the transparency that readers and listeners demand. [Read the interview highlights...]

Advertisement

The Bleeding Hills

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Comparing Google to an ordinary business is like comparing a rocket to an Edsel. No academic analysis or bystander’s account can capture it. Now Doug Edwards, Employee Number 59, offers the first inside view of Google, giving readers a chance to fully experience the bizarre mix of camaraderie and competition at this phenomenal company.

Edwards, Google’s first director of marketing and brand management, describes it as it happened. We see the first, pioneering steps of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company’s young, idiosyncratic partners; the evolution of the company’s famously nonhierarchical structure (where every employee finds a problem to tackle or a feature to create and works independently); the development of brand identity; the races to develop and implement each new feature; and the many ideas that never came to pass. Above all, Edwards—a former journalist who knows how to write—captures the “Google Experience,” the rollercoaster ride of being part of a company creating itself in a whole new universe.

I’m Feeling Lucky captures for the first time the unique, self-invented, yet profoundly important culture of the world’s most transformative corporation.

Editorial Reviews

“This is the first Google book told from the inside out. The teller is an ex-employee who joined Google early and who treats readers to vivid inside stories of what life was like before Google became a verb. Douglas Edwards recounts Google’s stumble and rise with verve and humor and a generosity of spirit. He kept me turning the pages of this engrossing tale.”
—Ken Auletta, author of Googled: The End of the World as We Know It

“Douglas Edwards is indeed lucky, sort of an accidental millionaire, a reluctant bystander in a sea of computer geniuses who changed the world. This is a rare look at what happened inside the building of the most important company of our time.”
—Seth Godin, author of Linchpin

“I’m Feeling Lucky is funny, revealing, and instructive, with an insider’s perspective I hadn’t seen anywhere before. I thought I had followed the Google story closely, but I realized how much I’d missed after reading—and enjoying—this book.”
—James Fallows, author of Postcards from Tomorrow Square

“Affectionate, compulsively readable. . . . This lively, thoughtful business memoir is more entertaining than it really has any right to be, and should be required reading for startup aficionados.”
—Publishers Weekly

Review

Having received this book as an advanced copy, I was giddy with excitement to read it. The book and the author didn’t disappoint.

Doug Edwards gives a thorough overview of what it was like in the early days of Google, his acclimation and assimilation into all things “Googley,” giving witness and words to Google’s rise, covering epic events in our lives, and sharing funny asides that make the book worth every minute.

I enjoyed the personal accounts of the April Fools pages(and only confirming in my mind that some people just lack a sense of humor), 9-11, a conversation with the Church of Scientology, and interactions and business models between Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft.

It’s a must read for anyone who loves technology, business and anti-culture. The ending is fitting and hopefully by now, Doug Edwards has caught up on some sleep. – Deirdre Honner, Amazon.Com Customer Review

An eye-opening peek at Google, behind the scenes

Boston.Com Book Review – July 19, 2011 (Excerpt)

One company is powering the word-processing software I’m using to write this, the e-mail program I’m keeping open as I do so, and the Internet search I’m using to procrastinate. It’s the same company that lets me say my destination into my phone, guides me there turn-by-turn, and handles the details of my personal schedule. All these services are free.

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Boiled Peanuts

A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents.  In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding.

Then Paul meets Bronwyn, a counselor who is lovely, independent and blind. She has inherited her Aunt Phyllis’ house and is newly arrived in town. When Paul first sees Bronwyn at church, he knows he wants to be part of her life. As the mystery of Aunt Phyllis unfolds, Bronwyn and Paul become more deeply involved as they learn about Phyllis’ secrets and how they relate to Bronwyn and her past, but Paul’s peeping ways may ruin it all. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Google AdWords Scam?

This morning I received an e-mail from Google AdWords:

Dear AdWords Advertiser,

We had encountered a number of issues when reviewing your ads this morning and we stopped running them. We will review them again and make the necessary changes that will allow to run your ads without any problems.

Click here to review your ads and let us know if we made a mistake.

We’ll often stop running your ads until we are able to make the necessary updates. As soon as we made and saved the changes, your ads are automatically resubmitted to us for review.

Please note: If you do not verify the status of your Adwords account and notify us if your ads do not appear online we can not help you and your ads will stay offline for the next few days.

Note: The above link has been removed for security reasons.

The problem is, we don’t run any advertisement with Google (for good reasons, I might add), and the e-mail is addressed to “undisclosed recipients.”

The link in the e-mail (http://www.google-pd.com/adwords/?ServiceLogin?service=adwords) leads to a website suspected to be a phishing website. Naturally, my browser put up a warning message, and I didn’t go any further.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Editorial Review

“Dense, driven examination of the pioneering search engine that changed the face of the Internet.

Thoroughly versed in technology reporting, Wired senior writer Levy deliberates at great length about online behemoth Google and creatively documents the company’s genesis from a ‘feisty start-up to a market-dominating giant.’ The author capably describes Google’s founders, Stanford grads Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as sharp, user-focused and steadfastly intent on ‘organizing all the world’s information.’ Levy traces how Google’s intricately developed, intrepid beginnings and gradual ascent over a competitive marketplace birthed an advertising-fueled ‘money machine’ (especially following its IPO in 2004), and he follows the expansion and operation of the company’s liberal work campus (‘Googleplex’) and its distinctively selective hiring process (Page still signs off on every new hire). The author was afforded an opportunity to observe the company’s operations, development, culture and advertising model from within the infrastructure for two years with full managerial cooperation. From there, he performed hundreds of interviews with past and current employees and discovered the type of ‘creative disorganization’ that can either make or break a business. Though clearly in awe of Google’s crowning significance, Levy evenhandedly notes the company’s more glaring deficiencies, like the 2004 cyber-attack that forced the removal of the search engine from mainland China, a decision vehemently unsupported by co-founder Brin. Though the author offers plenty of well-known information, it’s his catbird-seat vantage point that really gets to the good stuff.

Outstanding reportage delivered in the upbeat, informative fashion for which Levy is well known.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Life ‘In The Plex’: The Future Of Google

NPR Book Review – April 4, 2011 (Excerpt)

Google is getting a new CEO: Larry Page — who who co-founded Google as a young Stanford postgraduate and was briefly CEO before handing the position to the more experienced manager, Eric Schmidt — is now taking the reins. Although Page has remained a key decision-maker, he is taking the lead of a company that is very different from the one he helped found 13 years ago.

Page once said: “Google is not a conventional company, and we do not intend to become one.” But it’s now a public company with more than 20,000 employees, making tens of billions of dollars.

Steven Levy, a senior writer at Wired and author of the new book In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives,says Page is taking over a company that is much more conventional than when it started.

“Google is in the position of denying gravity in a way, and its ironic, because it is a company that prides itself on looking at data and logic,” Levy tells Morning Edition host Renee Montagne. “But to continue to succeed as it has been, it really has to think and act and be nimble like a smaller company than it really is. So it keeps thinking of innovative ways to pretend that it is a small company with the hunger and nimbleness of a startup.” [Read the full article...]

Steven Levy’s “In the Plex,” on Google

The Washington Post Book Review – June 10, 2011 (Excerpt)

As Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This concept has been the key to Google’s remarkable success. Google seems to read our minds. It delivers copious results to mundane queries. And it does so for free.

But believing in magic is unhealthy. If we fail to understand the nature of the technologies we invite into our lives, we risk being ruled by them, rather than ruling them. By demystifying even the most complex tools, we can learn to use them more wisely, criticize them intelligently, and admire the skill and craft that real human beings put into them. Steven Levy’s new book, “In the Plex,” demystifies Google fully, laying bare the company’s outsized ambitions and prodigious talents.

Levy is America’s premier technology journalist. Now a senior writer for Wired magazine, for years he explained the complexities of computers and the Internet to a general readership as Newsweek’s chief technology reporter. At Wired, he has a more tech-savvy readership. But he has lost none of his flair for digesting the complex into the comprehensible. In his previous work, he explained to us that hackers were not all evil troublemakers and that the iPod’s brilliance was in its simplicity of design — what Clarke would call magic. Levy is a Silicon Valley insider who writes for the rest of us on the outside. [Read the full article...]

Advertisement

Queen of Misfortune

A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Scam - The Google Profit Library

Maybe you have noticed, but I don’t run Google ads on this website. During the time that I ran the ads I have come to the following conclusions:

1. Despite 30,000+ unique visitors per month I created less than $30 in revenues per month.

2. Most of the ads as shown on this website were sponsored by known Internet scammers.

3. I create more revenue promoting my own products.

Let’s start with the quality (or lack thereof) of the Google AdSense system:

Vanity Publishers

Most of my posts address literature and writing. As we all know, Google picks up the keywords and displays ads according to the content of the individual page. Unfortunately, most of the ads are sponsored by the sharks in the publishing business, i.e. so-called vanity publishers who take money from the unsuspecting author. The author, in turn, never has a chance of creating noticeable sales other than to friends and family. The price range of these self-published books is way beyond average and puts the books out of a competitive range.

Another side effect is that these vanity publishers are only interested in profit and not in the quality of the product or talent of the writer. They make their profit through fees they charge to the author, and, consequently, they publish everything they can get their hands on, which, in turn, floods the literature market with hundred of thousands of low-quality books.

This situation makes it even harder for the traditional publishing industry to promote their products due to the increased “competition.” It also affects customers who, once burned, will apply extreme caution before they buy again. There are many more aspects, but let’s leave it at that.

My dilemma is that I write posts about literature. I also fight vanity publishers and their despicable morals by writing posts about them, while Google displays the vanity publishers’ ads beside my posts. Well, there goes my reputation…

Internet Scams

Some of my posts address the current overflow of scam activities on the Internet, especially those ads referring to Making Money From Home, weight loss programs, wrinkle removal, etc. It is paradox; I write about these scams, and people thank me frequently for saving them, because they found my posts before they signed up. Others, who fell for the scams, find advice on what to do (The best advice still is: Cancel your credit card a.s.a.p.).

On the other hand, the Google system picks up the keywords on my website and displays exactly the ads of the scammers I am attempting to fight (Not the main purpose of this website; call it a hobby). Again, I say these ads are scams, yet I display them on my website. I found this somehow conflicting.

So, the logical conclusion could be to make people aware of the situation and ask them to click on the ads without, however, signing up and submitting any credit card information. I would make some money per click (about $0.02, which would help to pay for my grandmother’s heart surgery… Just kidding!), but, most importantly, Google would charge the scammers for the clicks. The people who followed my advice would do a good deed.

However, if somebody took my advice literally and clicked numerous times on these ads… Google would kick me out! Rightfully, I may add. Google has been accused of allowing too many “click factories,” i.e. there are “organizations” who hire people in low-income countries to click and make money for them. Google is working hard to polish their reputation by eliminating invalid clicks; on the other hand, they’re losing their reputation, because the majority of Google ads cannot be trusted.

The majority of Google ads cannot be trusted

So, here may be the reason why this website created such a very low click rate. The majority of Google ads on this website were sponsored by the sharks in the publishing industry and known scammers promising easy income through the Internet. In all consequence, the Google Adsense system is counterproductive to the purpose of my website.

And yes, there are other, much higher-ranked websites like mine who allow ads of the most despicable nature. Take, for instance, online newspapers like The Washington Post or The Los Angeles Times. They seem to be in such dire need of online revenues that they lowered their standard of good taste significantly.

You, too, can help The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, and it won’t cost you a dime!

Just click on these weight loss, Internet income, and other fraudulent ads, but don’t sign up for services or products! The click will create revenue for The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, and the scammers will be charged. You are doing a good deed!

Naturally, I need income like any other guy, but 1. it is just not in my nature to sleep with the enemy and 2. I believe, I am better advised to place my own ads promoting my own products.

The only effective method to create income online

In summary:

1. I have been working hard to build up this blog, which, in all consequence, is now much more than just a personal blog. Currently, I see 30,000+ unique visitors per month with increasing tendency. The average earnings through Google Adsense were less than $30 per month. The click rate was minimal, even though I put up the maximum allowed ad space in premium locations. See also my post Does The Google Adsense Get-Rich-System Work?

2. The Google ads you see lately are mostly of despicable nature. Again, they are about making money from home, weight loss, wrinkle removal, and other scams. Add to this the numerous ads by vanity publishers (my website is mainly about literature and publishing), i.e. those publishers who take money from authors and publish any possible crap as long as the money is right. The authors in turn have no chance of earning royalties, because vanity publishers overprice their products. I deem these ads as damaging to my website’s reputation.

3. The best way to create sufficient income through a website is through selling products, and my core product are books. Consequently, I replaced Google ads with the ads from my own publishing business, Copperhill Media. I have been thinking about taking this step for a while, and it was time to make that switch. I believe, I will create more income that way. Google Adsense, the Amazon Affiliate program, and Infolinks have been a small contribution to the income of my business, but the main purpose should be the promotion of my product line.

On a side note: I have tried a number of other Affiliate programs, but the fact remains that Google is still the best in the business. Other programs did not produce an income that would come even close to Google, and, in most cases, the ads were of minor quality; some of them were outright disgusting.

The biggest disappointment was Chitika. Chitika is another affiliate program where the ad publisher needs to fulfill certain, stringent requirements before they are accepted. Too bad that Chitika couldn’t fulfill my requirements. Most of their ads had titles in the nature of “Looking for FrogenYozurt.Com?”, “Need info on FrogenYozurt.Com?”, “Make more money with FrogenYozurt.Com,” etc. It really doesn’t make any sense. See also my post Affiliate Programs: Chitika Is A Waste Of My Resources.

I will continue to use and trust the Amazon.Com Affiliate program, because it is scam-free per default. You get only paid when a visitor clicks and buys.

My advice to Google is: Get in touch with the U.S. Department of Justice (see section below). Pick their brains to determine who these scammers are and eliminate them as AdWords customers.

How Can I Report Mass-Marketing Fraud?

If you have a complaint about any type of Internet crime, you can file an online complaint with the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). The IC3 is a joint project of the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C). The IC3′s key functions for federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies will be (1) receiving online complaints, (2) analyzing them to identify particular schemes and general crime trends in Internet fraud, and (3) compiling and referring potential Internet fraud schemes to law enforcement. In addition to FBI and NW3C personnel, the IC3 will include agents and analysts detailed from other law enforcement agencies.

If you have a complaint about any type of consumer fraud, including any type of mass-marketing fraud, you can file a complaint through a toll-free Consumer Help Line, 1-877-FTC-HELP (1-877-382-4357) or online with the Federal Trade Commission

Source: U.S. Department of Justice - http://www.justice.gov/criminal/fraud/internet/

Advertisement

Queen of Misfortune

A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

The Dirty Little Secrets of Search

The New York Times – February 12, 2011 (Excerpt)

PRETEND for a moment that you are Google’s search engine.

Someone types the word “dresses” and hits enter. What will be the very first result?

There are, of course, a lot of possibilities. Macy’s comes to mind. Maybe a specialty chain, like J. Crew or the Gap. Perhaps a Wikipedia entry on the history of hemlines.

O.K., how about the word “bedding”? Bed Bath & Beyond seems a candidate. Or Wal-Mart, or perhaps the bedding section of Amazon.com.

“Area rugs”? Crate & Barrel is a possibility. Home Depot, too, and Sears, Pier 1 or any of those Web sites with “area rug” in the name, like arearugs.com.

You could imagine a dozen contenders for each of these searches. But in the last several months, one name turned up, with uncanny regularity, in the No. 1 spot for each and every term:

J. C. Penney.

The company bested millions of sites — and not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs. For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic (“tablecloths”) to the strangely specific (“grommet top curtains”).

This striking performance lasted for months, most crucially through the holiday season, when there is a huge spike in online shopping. J. C. Penney even beat out the sites of manufacturers in searches for the products of those manufacturers. Type in “Samsonite carry on luggage,” for instance, and Penney for months was first on the list, ahead of Samsonite.com.

With more than 1,100 stores and $17.8 billion in total revenue in 2010, Penney is certainly a major player in American retailing. But Google’s stated goal is to sift through every corner of the Internet and find the most important, relevant Web sites.

Does the collective wisdom of the Web really say that Penney has the most essential site when it comes to dresses? And bedding? And area rugs? And dozens of other words and phrases?

The New York Times asked an expert in online search, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question, as well as Penney’s astoundingly strong search-term performance in recent months. What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.

Despite the cowboy outlaw connotations, black-hat services are not illegal, but trafficking in them risks the wrath of Google. The company draws a pretty thick line between techniques it considers deceptive and “white hat” approaches, which are offered by hundreds of consulting firms and are legitimate ways to increase a site’s visibility. Penney’s results were derived from methods on the wrong side of that line, says Mr. Pierce. He described the optimization as the most ambitious attempt to game Google’s search results that he has ever seen.

“Actually, it’s the most ambitious attempt I’ve ever heard of,” he said. “This whole thing just blew me away. Especially for such a major brand. You’d think they would have people around them that would know better.” [Read the full article...]

Advertisement

Imperator

The Life of Gaius Julius Caesar

A Novel by Philip Katz – Available in all good bookstores

“Imperator – The Life of Gaius Julius Caesar” by Philip Katz is a fictional recreation of the life of the greatest of all Romans, Gaius Julius Caesar. It is a personal memoir, the inside story of his world as viewed through his eyes, written in the first person, suppressed by Caesar’s successors, only to be rediscovered in modern times. [More...]

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Channel 11 News Report - As Found Through The Washington Post Advertisement

As we all know too well, traditional newspapers are suffering from the Internet boom. Subscriber numbers are declining steadily, and the online versions (Damn if you do, damn if you don’t) don’t produce sufficient revenue to support the writing staff.

As a result, many newspapers, besides downsizing, tend to sign contracts with the devil… uhm… online advertising companies who promise high-quality online ads. However, even if you use regular Google Adsense (like this very website) you can’t prevent the display of the most despicable, misleading ad campaigns. Even if you can block ads insulting your sense of taste or style, why would you cut the hand that feeds you?

The Washington Post seems to be one of those newspapers who lower their level of integrity and pride in order to produce more revenue through clicks on their online advertisement.

The result comes in form of, in my very personal opinion, dubious ads such as:

• Channel 11 News Report – How a Small $90 Investment Turned Into $3900..
• 1 Mom’s Tip To Make $279/Day
• EXPOSED: New York Mom Makes $4,000/Month And You Won’t Believe How She Does It!
• $65/Hr Job – 25 Openings
• RMGX HOT Penny Stock – Making money vs. saving the planet? Do both! Invest today!
• Spinal Stenosis Pain? See where laser Spine Surgery Began-No Hospitalization!

You get the picture.

Don’t get me wrong, I love reading The Washington Post, especially Rob Pegoraro with his no-nonsense information on technology. I would hate to see The Washington Post vanish into nothingness. The same is true for other publications such as The Boston Globe (and their ever-annoying Netflix-popups on Boston.Com), The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, and others.

So, here’s my suggestion:

Support The Washington Post Financially Without Spending A Dime

You can support The Washington Post without spending a dime, and you can do a good deed by clicking on those ads that you personally find despicable and misleading. Every click creates some very small revenue for The Washington Post, but if we all do it frequently, it will support The Washington Post, and it will cost the advertisers.

Just a fair warning, though: Do not submit your credit card or any other information to these websites. Just click and close.

If you have doubts about the advertiser’s intention, please check out my section Making Money From Home, which describes their workings.

Pay special attention to my post The Scam: Work At Home Mom Makes $6,397/Month Part-Time, especially the numerous comments it received by those who were scammed or those who were saved by reading the post before signing up. These scams target and hit the most vulnerable people in our society, specifically those without a job. The workings of the advertisers are officially legal due to their disclaimer, basically stating that the website’s content was faked for marketing purposes.

Happy Clicking! You are doing a good deed!

Note: This post reflects my very personal opinion based on research on the topic of online advertisement. My views should not be taken as a proven fact, and they are not necessarily shared by others.

Click to enlarge...

“Have you ever heard of “Penny Auctions”? If you haven’t, but you’re the type always looking for bargains and amazing deals, then you’re in luck! Penny auctions are a new auction model that are rapidly becoming very popular in the US and Europe. Penny auctions allow individuals to do just what it implies, win popular products for pennies on the dollar. Leading the way in this new auction model is QuiBids.com, an Oklahoma based company. QuiBids auctions off brand new popular products such as iPads, Macbooks, HDTVs, Digital Cameras, Gaming Consoles, and more for steep discounts of 75%, 80%, or even 85% off retail price.

Sounds too good to be true right? Surprisingly, it’s not. See, QuiBids isn’t run like your typical auction. Along with people snagging great deals at a fraction of the product’s cost is the fact that users pay to participate in these auctions. Each bid placed on QuiBids costs users $0.60. By collecting $0.60 for each bid placed, QuiBids is able to afford giving away products on the cheap such as Macbooks for $23.72 or Nikon Digital Cameras for $57.42.”

You may have found this Online ad on abcnews.com, msnbc.com, washingtonpost.com, or somewhere else, but don’t be fooled! ABC News, MSNBC, and others are not responsible for the ads they display, and they don’t add any value to the actual advertisement.

Just a fair warning: The so-called “Penny Auction” may be another scam!

If you found this Online ad, do yourself a favor and be extremely cautious. DO NOT, by any means, submit your credit card information, and if you already did it, CANCEL YOUR CREDIT CARD! If these guys are what I suspect they are, they will suck you dry!

A few hints:

• The so-called reporter Julie is definitely a fake. The photo of the young woman shown on the website appears on many known scam websites.
• The so-called “Consumer Tips Digest” logo is a fake.
• The website structure is identical to many known scam websites.
• The YouTube videos, including the “News 9″ logo, are fake. They are being mass-produced for a number of scam websites.
• A company like Apple would never allow any retailer to sell their products for 75+% off retail price.

Still not convinced? Read my post on http://www.frogenyozurt.com/my-articles/making-money-from-home/.

Read the comments from readers of my website on the bottom of this page: The Scam: Work At Home Mom Makes $6,397/Month Part-Time.

Remember: If it sounds too good to be true, it most probably is!

Advertisement

Vampire Ascending

by Lorelei Bell Sabrina Strong is a Touch Clairvoyant who knows a secret. She knows her mother was turned into a vampire when Sabrina was ten. Now that she is grown up, a powerful magnate in the Chicago business world hires her to reveal the identity of who relentlessly murders vampires in his ultra-modern stronghold of a hotel. [Read More...] – Including an excerpt of the first chapter.

Vampire Ascending is now available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Julia

“America had to tackle the drastic economic downturn affecting the sustainability of the country. The major worry was the Huge Debt that gave rise to a great number of bankruptcy cases and taking the situation from bad to worse. In order to find a solution to this financial debacle, new regulations were introduced to which creditors have had to resort to relieving people’s debt.

This plan to reduce debt can be seen as an attractive effort to relieve Americans from theirdebt burden. The new regulations made available has led to feasible debt reduction options.

By simply filling out a short qualification form (below), Americans are able to tap into this life-saving assistance. You just have to initiate the process yourself.

We began our investigation when we received a letter from a Linda Jenkins, a single mother of 2 young girls in Dallas, Texas. After a devastating loss left her jobless and alone, Linda found herself facing the real threat of losing her home and not being able to feed her children.

I read Linda’s story last month and decided to feature her story in our local finance report. In our correspondence she told me about her remarkable journey.”

You may have found this Online ad on abcnews.com, msnbc.com, washingtonpost.com, or somewhere else, but don’t be fooled! ABC News, MSNBC, and others are not responsible for the ads they display, and they don’t add any value to the actual advertisement.

Just a fair warning: The so-called “Consumer Debt Plan” may be another scam!

Click to enlarge...

If you found this Online ad, do yourself a favor and be extremely cautious. DO NOT, by any means, submit your credit card information, and if you already did it, CANCEL YOUR CREDIT CARD! If these guys are what I suspect they are, they will suck you dry!

A few hints:

• The so-called reporter Julia is definitely a fake. The photo of the young woman shown above appears on many know scam websites.
• The so-called “News 6″ logo is a fake. The two people on top are also used to resemble Jennifer Theuriau and James Field, top news anchors of CNNews, yet another fake. See my post http://www.frogenyozurt.com/2010/05/cnnews-supports-online-work-at-home-program-scam/.
• The website structure is identical to many known scam websites.
• The hyperlinks on the “News 6″ website don’t work.

Still not convinced? Read my post on http://www.frogenyozurt.com/my-articles/making-money-from-home/.

Read the comments from readers of my website on the bottom of this page: The Scam: Work At Home Mom Makes $6,397/Month Part-Time.

Remember: If it sounds too good to be true, it most probably is!

Advertisement

The Bleeding Hills

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Having a masters degree in Electrical Engineering myself, I don’t doubt the necessity of complex algorithms that allow to produce search results from millions of websites within seconds. I don’t doubt the massive investment of money and manpower to provide us, the Internet users, with the information we are looking for.

However, I am nothing short of stupefied by the dumb-as-dumb-can-be search results I receive frequently. We are living in the 21st century. Computers listen to our voice, and they answer. Computers recognize traffic patterns and control traffic accordingly. Yet, computers cannot distinguish between the city of Boston and the rock band Boston. They tell you to enter your question like a regular sentence as if you were talking to a human. But this is where the intelligence stops. The search results – millions of them – are discouraging.

The ineffectiveness of presenting search results has been confirmed by an article I read recently in the online version of the New York Times (See: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/google-buys-metaweb-to-improve-search-results/?hpw). Here is an excerpt:

There are some Web searches that Google doesn’t handle so well — like finding a famous person’s birthday, or searching for a word that means many different things. Search for “Boston,” for example, and all the top links are about the city in Massachusetts. But Boston is also the name of a band and 26 other cities.

Google said Friday that in an effort to improve these tricky types of search queries, it was buying Metaweb, a San Francisco start-up that says it makes Web sites smarter.

Hey, Google and Bing! Meet 44 Year Old ELIZA!

You may call me old-fashioned, but many, many years ago in a different lifetime of mine I played with a programming language called BASIC. I don’t even know if versions of BASIC still exist. The latest version, I believe, comes in form of Microsoft’s VisualStudio that includes an advanced version of VisualBasic. The most interesting, because interactive, program I found was ELIZA. The program listing (i.e. the source ode) for ELIZA fits on three pages of a standard 8.5″ x 11″ paper sheet. The results are, nevertheless, amazing.

ELIZA asks questions and responds intelligently to the user’s input. In scientific terms, “ELIZA is concerned with: (1) the identification of key words, (2) the discovery of minimal context, (3) the choice of appropriate transformations, (4) generation of responses in the absence of key words. ELIZA is a program which makes natural language conversation with a Computer possible.” (Source:  ELIZA – A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine by Joseph Weizenbach, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., January 1966)

Looking at attributes like identification of keywords, discovery of minimal context, choice of appropriate transformations, generations of responses in the absence of keywords… Isn’t that exactly what we are looking for in a search engine? I wouldn’t mind some additional responses like “Do you mean the city or the rock band?”

Isn’t it amazing that Google spends millions in an effort to keep up with Bing? Bing, after all, provides better search results, but it still is no ELIZA. You can buy the document ELIZA – A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine for a mere $15! Just log on to http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=365168&dl=GUIDE&coll=GUIDE&CFID=95147346&CFTOKEN=39216600.

Demo Session With ELIZA

Well, the most popular application for ELIZA was resembling a psychologist, and that is clearly demonstrated in the session demo below. The responses are, nevertheless, amazing. The session also demonstrates convincingly the effective analysis of keywords and the generation of intelligent responses. As I mentioned before, the program listing is amazingly short. See http://home.cmit.net/rwolbeck/programmingtutorial/code/eliza.htm as an example.

Men are all alike
IN WHAT WAY
They’re always bugging us about something or other.
CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE
Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
He says I’m depressed much of the time.
I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED
It’s true. I am unhappy.
DO YOU THINK COMING HERE WILL HELP YOU NOT TO BE UNHAPPY
I need some help, that much seems certain.
WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO YOU IF YOU GOT SOME HELP
Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother.
TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY
My mother takes care of me.
WHO ELSE IN YOUR FAMILY TAKES CARE OF YOU
My father.
YOUR FATHER
You are like my father in some way.
WHAT RESEMBLANCE DO YOU SEE
You are not very aggressive but I think you don’t want me to notice that.
WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I AM NOT VERY AGGRESSIVE
You don’t argue with me.
WHY DO YOU THINK I DON’T ARGUE WITH YOU
You are afraid of me.
DOES IT PLEASE YOU TO BELIEVE I AM AFRAID OF YOU
My father is afraid of everybody.
WHAT ELSE COMES TO MIND WHEN YOU THINK OF YOUR FATHER
Bullies.
DOES THAT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE

Just a fair warning upfront: Creating sufficient income through advertisement on your website or blog is virtually impossible!

I personally run a number of blogs and websites filled with advertisement through several affiliate programs, and I still don’t make enough money to cover my monthly grocery bill. I have heard of one blogger in Singapore who is very successful by making roughly $800 per month, but he got there through very hard work and he got there after years of creating websites.

The boom of making money through websites or blogs is over! Click rates are declining, i.e. readers are more and more reluctant to click on online ads.

Note: Google is still very successful, but not necessarily based on a few, very effective websites. Their success comes through volume, i.e. the vast number of not-so-effective websites producing a few clicks per month.

One of the Affiliate programs I had joined mentioned that you need a minimum of 30,000 unique visitors a month to create sufficient income, which is very difficult to achieve on a long-term basis, i.e you need to maintain that level through frequent updating of your website(s).

Let’s apply some realistic numbers based on my experience with Google Ads: CTR – Click Through Rate = 0.5% and $0.50 per click. Assuming 30,000 unique visitors per month, you will create 150 clicks per month and create an income of $75 per month.

Yes, you can increase the income by adding advertisement from other Affiliate programs, but 1. creating 30,000 unique visitors per month requires extraordinary work, and 2. excessive use of online ads may have a negative impact on your website’s acceptance.

The following represents my personal experience with a number of Affiliate systems:

• Google Adsense - Click Through Rate (CTR) is roughly 0.5% with roughly $0.50 per click. These numbers will vary from website to website depending on content and value to the Internet community. Needless to say, their ads are usually of good quality and are clearly adjusted to the website’s content. Payment options are very flexible, and they pay quickly. Over all my rating is “Good.”
• Infolinks – CTR = 2+% with roughly $0.12 per click. It seems that visitors are much more inclined to click on “inline” advertisement, but the downside is a lower income per click. In the end, Infolinks evens out with Google. Advantage: You can easily mix Google and Infolinks on your website, and it doesn’t look cluttered. The ads are not well adjusted to the web page content; I assume their variety of ads is limited compared to Google. What I don’t like is their payment policy. They don’t offer direct deposits into your bank account. Payments per direct deposit require a minimum of $400(!); PayPal $50; Recommended payment is per prepaid MasterCard. Also, you have to apply to add more websites, which is more or less a formality, but takes up to two days. Nevertheless, I am very satisfied with the daily income created through them. My rating: “Good.”
• Kontera – No data available; I only tested them briefly and discarded them quickly. Their pitch is that they’re better than Infolinks due to better “inline” ads, a statement that does not match my experience. Their ads are very limited and are by far not relevant to the website’s content. They allow only three inline ads per page, and they load very slowly (Infolinks shows a lot more ads without looking intrusive). Their payment options are very flexible, and you don’t need to apply to add more websites; you just add their code to any website you run. My rating: “Don’t bother.”
• Amazon.Com – Tough to compare with Google or others, since Amazon doesn’t pay per click. They pay a percentage of an actual sales made through the online ad, which can be up to several Dollars. Amazon provides a great number of different ads and different products, but they require more work to set up than other programs. This month I managed to create more than 300 clicks, but created only one sale (which is not typical). My rating: “Okay.”
• AdBrite – To say it upfront, I removed all AdBrite ads from my websites. CTR was 0.13%, and they paid in average $0.06 per click. You can choose between two levels of advertisement, the better one being the “family-friendly” version. “Family-Friendly” means you get ads from, for instance, Toyota or Porsche, which are promoted as high-quality, but in reality nobody clicks on their ads. The non-family-friendly version allows ads of the worst kind, including weight loss programs and other questionable services (to put it diplomatically). If you don’t care much about reputation, you can use them as a Google alternative. My rating: “Two thumbs down!”
• ClickBank – Terrible! Terrible! They work on the same principle as Amazon; they pay you per actual sales, which is acceptable. However, the quality of the product and service ads represents the lowest level I have experienced so far. First, they only provide you a link to the actual product page, which also includes your specific ID. You, as the ad publisher, are responsible to create a dedicated page for the product and include the hyperlink, meaning there is quite some effort involved. They offer a great number of products you can write about, but most of the product pages are  maintained by what I consider to be scammers. The web pages are longer than my arm, filled with all kinds of success slogans, and you can’t leave the website without specifically clicking on the “Okay” button. My rating: “Stay away from Clickbank!”

I wish I could report two other services that seem to be the best when it comes to creating income:

• Text Link Ads – They rejected my website within 24 hours. Apparently, they have very high standards in regards to the website traffic you create. My 400,000+ web site hits per month didn’t do it for them.
• Chitika – The response from Chitika – four weeks after I applied-  was especially interesting:
  “We would like to apologize for the delay in your Chitika application review for account.  As we prepare to transition to a new upgraded version of Chitika, we are temporarily holding off on approving new domains and accounts. Note: We are currently running an exclusive beta test on the new upgraded Chitika ads for large/ComScore 500 domains.  If you are earning more than $10,000 USD per month from advertising on your domain (with AdSense, direct advertisers, etc.), please send us an email, or give us a call to speak with a Chitika team member.”

News Daily 7 - Click image to enlarge

The London, UK Job Report announces “Work At Home Mum Makes £4,397/Month Part-Time.” You find the article on the fake News Daily 7 website. Here we go again, Kelly Richards made it into the United Kingdom. See also my post Kelly Richards a.k.a. Melissa Johnson Sighted in Great Britain.

This morning I received an e-mail from Derek in Bristol, UK, saying:
“Hi Wilfried,
I found your site whilst searching for reviews of the following site advert.
I see the infamous Kelly work at home Mum has moved to Bristol UK, http://newsdaily7[dot]com.
You have saved me some money so I have now invested in your book “A No-Nonsense Guide to a Professional Blog”
Best Wishes, Derek.”

Well, I am always glad when my posts on this website help people to save their money, may it be here in the United States or somewhere else in the world. I have received responses from as far as Australia. Some of them thanked me for saving them. After all they did their research.

Others were not so lucky, and asked what they could do to get their money back. My advice would be to get in touch with your bank or credit card institution a.s.a.p. and dispute the charges. There is no guarantee that this will work, and it will take some perseverance. The Kelly Richard scammers are extremely clever and ruthless, but they also have made their operation fool-proof which may make it difficult for banks to help their customers.

For all those who read this post, please feel free to leave a comment below. The more information we share the better we can help prevent further damage.

Advertisement

Queen of Misfortune

A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

Now Available As Paperback And Kindle Edition!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Screen shot TheCNNews.org - Click on image to enlarge

Jennifer Theuriau and James Field, top news anchors of CNNews, report on the CNNews website, “Work At Home Mom Makes $8,795/Month Part-Time.”

In the article they write, “Have You Ever Considered Working Online? Kelly Richards of Griffith, IN never thought that she would, until curiosity got the best of her and she filled out a simple online form. Before she knew it, she discovered her secret to beating the recession, and being able to provide for her family while at home with her three children. I read Kelly’s blog last month and decided to feature her story in our weekly consumer report. In our phone interview she told me her amazing story. “I actually make about $8,000-$9,000 a month working from home. It’s enough to comfortably replace my old jobs income, especially considering I only work about 15-18 hours a week from home.” – Source: CNNews. Copyright 2010 © CNNews. All Rights Reserved.

Well, if CNNews’ top people report about it, it must be true. Right?

The truth is, what we have here is a blatant, if not illegal, attempt to create creditability by copying the CNN logo (not an exact copy, but close enough to violate trademark rights) and impersonating a reliable news source such as CNN. I haven’t investigated whether or not the featured reporters Jennifer Theuriau or James Field actually work for CNN, but I seriously doubt it.

On a side note: Looking at the screen shot of the CNNews website, notice that Kelly Richards, besides living in almost every city all over the United States at the same time (see my articles series about Kelly Richards at Making Money From Home), can also change appearances (Maybe we should tip off the Men in Black that one of their aliens has left New York). The hyperlinks on top of the website (Subscribe, News, Comments, and E-Mail) are not hyperlinks; they’re just plain fake.

Needless to say, the “Online Work at Home Program” including the “Google Profit Library” and the “Web Profit Club” are all scams, and they are defrauding unsuspecting American citizens. The problem is that the service they offer plus their marketing methods, if you ignore the trademark violations, are basically legal. The service they offer (making money through Google AdSense) is legitimate. However, Google AdSense is a free-of-charge service by Google (who is not part of the scam). In other words, there is no need to sign up for a monthly subscription to incorporate Google ads on your website. What the scammers present as the ultimate way of becoming rich, is common knowledge in the Internet community. And yes, you can create income through Google ads, but in all regularity you will not create sufficient income to cover you monthly grocery bill, let alone your mortgage. See also my article Does The Google Adsense Get-Rich-System Work?

For instance, this very website you are looking at received 110,000+ hits last month alone, and it took me a mere 15 months of continuous work to get there. This last month I made less than $20 through Google ads. I have to admit that I should place more ads per page, but my primary purpose of this website is to promote my books.

Chances are, the Google ads you see on this web page are dedicated to other getting-rich scams such as “My Million Dollar Edge,” or others. Do me a favor: Click on these ads! By clicking on the ads you will support me free-of-charge to you, and, at the same time, it will cost the scammers. But please, do not believe what they tell you on their websites! If something sounds too good to be true, it most certainly is.

Last, but not least, I was made aware of the CNNews scam website through a reader’s comment. Please feel free to share your comments by using the comment box below. I’d like to hear from you!

Advertisement

VAMPIRE ASCENDING

by Lorelei Bell Sabrina Strong is a Touch Clairvoyant who knows a secret. She knows her mother was turned into a vampire when Sabrina was ten. Now that she is grown up, a powerful magnate in the Chicago business world hires her to reveal the identity of who relentlessly murders vampires in his ultra-modern stronghold of a hotel. [Read More...] – Including an excerpt of the first chapter.

Vampire Ascending is now available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Uh, the gravity of an irresistible (yet misleading) headline! Yes, I am guilty of reading The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging. On page 74 the book lists the Top Ten Horrible Publicity Stunt Ideas, and by using above headline I ruthlessly copied and modified the horrible publicity stunt ideas 6 and 9.

Now that I am blogging for a mere 15 months I wasn’t quite convinced that a book published in 2008 would be able to present interesting insights on blogging on top of what I already know. After all, these days technology changes fast within two years. In fact, there are a few minor details that have changed since the release (for instance, the Yahoo self-service platform for small publishers, also known as Yahoo Publisher Network Online was closed as of April 30 this year). However, the book’s content is so much more than a mere instruction on running your blog. This is a book written by the very best blogging professionals in the Internet business world, and, regardless of whether you are a blogging novice or a blog professional, you will not put this book aside unless you have read it in full.

Yes, there is information on starting a blog, increasing web traffic, making money online, etc., but I wouldn’t recommend this guide for that particular purpose. There are other, much more detailed works available. The guts of this book is – as strange as it may sound – about the nature of blogs, their history, their impact on today’s world, and, most importantly, the passion that comes with writing a blog. The passion is emphasized by comments from people like Nora Ephron, Harry Shearer, Jamie Lee Curtis, Gary Hart, John Ridley, Steven Weber (Hey, Steve, I don’t hate you! I just miss Wings!), and others.

Reading the Complete Guide to Blogging effectively convinces you that you need to start your own blog immediately, and if you already have one, the authors give you the feeling that you are one of them. There is no looking down on the poor blogger with his/her mere two pages. The guide is full of advice for everybody. The language is clear, comprehensive, and professional. The reader will learn why The Huffington Post is so incredibly successful in times where traditional newspapers are struggling to maintain readership.

This book is a must-read for every blogger at every level, including those who work for the online versions of traditional newspapers. It is made to learn from the top professionals in the business.

The only complaint I have is about the extremely sparse table of content, now that I am looking for the definition of Fair Use and Copyright (Here it is – page 50). I hope it is “fair use” when I quote the horrible publicity stunt ideas 6 and 9 here in this post. If it’s not, please contact me, and I will humbly repent.

Horrible Publicity Stunt Idea #6:
Start a rumor that a book based on your blog is the next Oprah selection (and, OMG, you’re giving out tickets to the show where she’ll discuss it!).

Horrible Publicity Stunt Idea #9:
Write an open letter to the National Parks Service offering $10 million if they’ll have the Statue of Liberty hold a sign  with your blog name on it for a day (in place of the torch). Since you know they’ll say no, it doesn’t matter that you don’t have $10 million.

For eight more horrible publicity stunt ideas I recommend reading The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging.

Book Description

- Source: Amazon.Com.

The editors of The Huffington Post–the most linked-to blog on the web–offer an A-Z guide to all things blog, with information for everyone from the tech-challenged newbie looking to get a handle on this new way of communicating to the experienced blogger looking to break through the clutter of the Internet. With an introduction by Arianna Huffington, the site’s cofounder and editor in chief, this book is everything you want to know about blogging, but didn’t know who to ask.

As entertaining as it is informative, The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging will show you what to do to get your blog started. You’ll find tools to help you build your blog, strategies to create your community, tips on finding your voice, and entertaining anecdotes from HuffPost bloggers that will make you wonder what took you so long to blog in the first place.

The Guide also includes choice selections from HuffPost’s wide-ranging mix of top-notch bloggers. Among those who have blogged on HuffPost are Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Larry David, Jane Smiley, Bill Maher, Nora Ephron, Jon Robin Baitz, Steve Martin, Lawrence O’Donnell, Ari Emanuel, Mia Farrow, Al Franken, Gary Hart, Barbara Ehrenreich, Edward Kennedy, Harry Shearer, Nancy Pelosi, Adam McKay, John Ridley, and Alec Baldwin.

A No-Nonsense Guide to a Professional Blog

Last, but not least, if you want honest information on how to start a web site or blog and make money from it, check out my book, A No-Nonsense Guide to a Professional Blog(There is also a preview of the book). Honestly, I wrote it after learning about the so-called “Google Profit Library” and reading the book “New Path to Riches” by Nick Usborne (Don’t buy it. It’s a huge waste of time!). I deemed it was time to stop the nonsense. The book shows you step by step how to set up a professional blog with some advice on how to run it, and maybe even make some money from it. The difference is, you don’t pay me at all (I would appreciate that you buy the book, paperback or PDF), and the required investment of roughly $120 per year goes to your Internet service provider for running your web site. Also, check out myprofessionalblog.com. This is the web site I created to write the book, meaning I created the web site, made screen-shots and included them into the document.

Just the other day I received another comment on the current Internet scam, may it be the Google Profit Library or the Web Profit Club, famously promoted through the “success” of Kelly Richards, a.k.a. Michelle Richardson, Melissa Johnson, and other names.

Let me quote the comment:
“I made the mistake of “fooling myself” and submitting my info for the internet scam fraud you wrote about in January, but because your article popped up, I called to cancel my account. They have an address, a billing department and a customer service department. I was able to cancel my account and avoid the $139 charge, but is the company valid? I see from your article that the advertising is fake, but what about this business? Are people doing this?”

1. Is the Company valid?

Yes, companies offering a getting-rich-system based on creating income through Google ads, despite a despicable business attitude, are valid – as far as I can tell. In turn, the services and advice they offer are are valid as well.

The Web Profit Club, for instance, is located at 11136 Ferragamo CT, Las Vegas, NV 89141, if you can believe their web site information. The first warning sign, though, is their very limited web site where the majority of links lead to the same page. The disclaimer, terms and conditions, and the privacy policy on their web site are written and presented in an amateurish way, and, when push comes to shove, they might not hold up in court. My estimate is that this is a one-man operation, proving that you can make money through the Internet… It is easy to set up a web site like this and pretend you have a customer service department, You just set up an e-mail address such as support@webprofitclub.com, and everybody is convinced that the service department, in fact, exists.

So, what’s the real scam, you may ask?

What these companies sell you as a service is common knowledge in the Internet world!

The scam starts with the simple fact that you don’t need these companies to start your own website and add Google ads. The Google Adsense service is free of charge, and it is available to everybody who runs a website. You can avoid services, such as the Web Profit Club, by buying Google Adsense for Dummies (a much better and at the same time cheaper investment for the same thing), or even use the vast information on the Internet, or even have a look at the Google Adsense tour.

The scam continues with promising fast cash and getting rich very fast. All you have to do is paying their monthly fee – an initial $2.97 sign-up fee plus a (hidden) monthly fee of $49.00 and $139.00 for additional services. The service description and charges may change, but the pattern is the same: You pay good money for something that doesn’t work for 99.99% of the users. On top you don’t need their services and you don’t need to pay them to go through that kind of experience.

2. Are people doing this?

I interpret the question as: Are people using the system as offered by the scammers? I don’t have any solid information, but I am sure that some users actually are using the system, and they may even make money out of it.

The question arises again, why should we not sign up with the Web Profit Club?

The answer is very simple: First, as I explained before, you don’t need the Web Profit Club (or whatever term they use these days; there is a multitude of similar services out there) to create your own website with Google ads. Secondly, the system will not work for the vast majority of users, and I will explain why.

How to get rich through Goole Ads – or not

The principe is easy: You create a website or blog, then you add Google ads. As I explained before, the Google Adsense service is free of charge and is available for everybody who runs a website. As soon as somebody comes to your website and clicks on one of the Google ads, you will have created an income between a few cents and a Dollar depending on the ad. Adding these ads to your website is fairly easy; the Google website will provide you the code that you just copy and paste. Also through the Google website you can keep track of your income, and Google pays you on a monthly basis.

Sounds easy enough, but there are a few obstacles; the most serious of them is creating web traffic. The other problem is that you cannot create sufficient income through only one website or blog; the average income will not be sufficient to pay for your monthly grocery bill, let alone a mortgage.

Okay, the solution is to create more than just one website, let’s say 500. Let’s apply some math to calculate the possible income: You run 500 websites, and each website draws 2,000 visitors per month. You assume that 2% of these visitors will actually click on an ad (it’s called the average CTR – Click Through Rate, and 2% is low). With an average payment of $0.25 per click and 40 clicks a day you will have made $10.00 per day per website. With 500 websites you make $5,000 a day! That’s $1,825,000 a year!

The saying is, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t. On the other hand, you may say, it’s not about getting filthy rich, and maintaining 500 websites seems a little out of reach. We just want to make a reasonable second income, and even if we are not quite as successful, we just might make enough money to keep us happy.

Okay, rule #1 in any business: Success comes only with blood, sweat, tears, and time – a lot of time. It doesn’t come with working 15 hours a week, and the rest of your time you sit at your swimming pool sipping your martini. Even if you spent 80 hours a week you will not see instantaneous success. As I wrote before, creating a website and adding Google ads is easy, but you will have trouble creating web traffic. Your web site is only one out of countless others in the world wide web.

My personal blog, at the time of this writing, attracts 4,000+ unique visitors a month. I got there by adding to my blog on a constant basis plus applying a ton of measures to attract attention. I reached the 4,000 mark after roughly 14 months. I, too, use some Google ads, but I have to admit my main focus is on promoting the books I wrote. The income through Google ads on my blog is roughly $20 a month. It could be more if I filled the whole place with ads, but, again, that is not my intention.

My advice, in case you still want to jump on the wagon:

1. Do not sign up for the Web Profit Club or similar services promising you the ultimate path to riches.

2. Open an account with a reputable Internet service provider such as GoDaddy.com, BlueHost.com, or others. Believe me, it’s easy. The costs will be around $120 a year, but it’s money well spent on a legitimate and honest business.

3. Create a website or, even better, a blog. My recommendation is to install WordPress on your website. This very website you are looking at was created with WordPress.

4. Sign up for a Google Adsense Account at adsense.google.com.

5. Don’t expect to get rich overnight.

Start out with a blog in a niche, about a topic you are knowledgeable and passionate about. The main rule is to create unique and valid content. The next rule is to create as much content as you can, and you need to do that on a regular basis. If your blog runs well, you can think about starting another one, and another one, applying the same principle. Nevertheless, the process will take time, and, still, there is no guarantee for success.

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For the love of god, I don’t want whiter teeth

Note: Interesting article, especially since msnbc.com and pulse360 are business partners… The same ads, the reporter is complaining about, appear on the same web page as his article.

And so we come to the networks, the most irresponsible and hypocritical of our cast. Let’s take Pulse360, the ad network that serves up many of TBM’s scam ads, as another case study. I talked to Jaan Janes, the CEO of Pulse360, for an infuriating 45 minutes. My objective: figure out whether these kinds of ads comply with Pulse360’s ad guidelines. Janes repeatedly said that every ad and its corresponding site is hand-screened at Pulse360, primarily to ensure that contact information is visible on the site. But they do not call every phone number to see whether anybody actually picks up the line. (They say they do spot checks.) Logic implies that if the ads are personally screened and then end up in the network, they comply with the guidelines.

As found on msnbc.com…

Q: How do you stop a pulse 360 ad from popping up?

A: Some Pulse ads are downright fake. There’s a weight loss one that lists the woman as from my home town “Susi from xxx lost 40 pounds!!”, but when I was out of state, I noticed the same ad listing the woman from the town I was now in..

It just gets the city your IP is from and inserts that into the ad. Deception makes me want to buy!!!

I clicked the ad and it’s totally bogus. They even use Rachael Ray’s likeness but spell her name wrong.

In the about us page, it even say’s “We know we mis-spelled Rachael’s name, but it was too late to fix it.” To late to fix it, but not too late to write text right underneath it saying it was too late to fix it????!!!!

Nice integrity!

As found on wiki.answers.com.

Are Alexa.com Ads by Pulse360-Kanoodle Violating FTC Truth in Advertising?

A few months ago, the web information company Alexa redesigned their website and since then I’ve been noticing these incredibly distasteful advertisements pitching weight loss products, wrinkle removers and suspicious get rich quick schemes. While these type of advertisments are nothing new on the internet, what stood out to me was each advertisement appears to be placed by a person who is located in the same city as myself.

If you look up any of these blogs in Google, there are numerous bloggers warning that these flogs (as Jay Weintraub calls them)are blatant by scum of the earth affiliate marketers (Lincoln Adams’s affectionate term for the unethical blackhat set) scams.

Read more…

Pulse360 – how to get rid off it?

Note: The following is a forum  inquiry. I, personally, suspect that pulse360 is (or has been) actively using some kind of malware to promote their ads. Many references I found on the Internet point into that direction.

Recently, I started to get Pulse360 pop up window. My pop-up blocker is on, I removed Pulse360 from the Registry, deleted cookie, but the next day it was back… How to get rid of Pulse360?

See the full inquiry…

Ads by Pulse 360

Does Pulse 360 do anything other than advertise for a miracle substance that “gets you ripped” in 4 weeks? The only other thing I have EVER seen there is a very disreputable looking “miracle” teeth whitener. It seems like this “ad network” is composed of nothing but disreputable crap. I guess this is nothing new, just the second (or 3rd, 4th, 5th…) coming of the Thighmaster style product.

I’m actually seeing this advertising on major sites like NBC sports. Everyone but the most gullible of us knows you can’t “get ripped” in 4 weeks unless you are already very low % body fat. If you click the ad and go to the landing page it is your typical “scammy” web site, it even brings up a pop-up window that asks if you are sure you want to leave when you try to navigate away. I actually read the page and this stuff is flat out GARBAGE. It literally tells people not to “waste time” working out.

Read the full reference…

How can I stop Pulse360 (sponsored listings) from popping up when I open up msnbc.com – I have Adblock Plus installed but no luck

Note: The following confirms my suspicion that pulse360 is in some way promoted by malware.

Q: Pulse360 only “pops up” when I open an article on the msnbc.com website while in Firefox. I use AdBlock Plus and I have searched the “blockable items” list to try to block it but nothing shows up for Pulse360. When it opens it shows it is “sponsored listings” for the site. Please help – this keeps me from going to msnbc when I really would like to view some of their articles. Thanks.

A: Your list of installed plugins shows that you have the My Web Search Plugininstalled, well-known malware which you should remove.

Read the full reference…

Inactivity charges Pulse360?

One of the smaller PPC services we have tested is called Pulse360. (Purposely not linking to them). We made a small $100 deposit to do some testing, and ended up pausing the campaigns after so so results. Like every other service I have ever used, I expected the balance to remain there until I was ready for more testing. Imagine my surprise when I got an email from them stating that they had removed $10 from my account for “inactivity charges”. I have to say this is a totally lame and cheap way to squeeze money from an already paying customer. You could have gotten tons of money from me by just serving up good traffic, but this little stunt has sealed it for me. I’ll be closing my account before the rest of the balance is charged away by you guys.

Read the full reference…

Pulse360

Pulse 360 is bad ad source to use. They irritate me more than anything. I see popunders all the time when I visit websites that use them and have received warnigns of spyware and adware from their ads. They are a horrible source for ads and lack security to protect anyone who carries their ads for them. My antivirus program gave warnings of spyware when their ads popped up.

Read the full reference…

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Vampire Ascending

by Lorelei Bell Sabrina Strong is a Touch Clairvoyant who knows a secret. She knows her mother was turned into a vampire when Sabrina was ten. Now that she is grown up, a powerful magnate in the Chicago business world hires her to reveal the identity of who relentlessly murders vampires in his ultra-modern stronghold of a hotel. [Read More...] – Including an excerpt of the first chapter.

Vampire Ascending is now available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Every website, promising easy income through running a website with Google ads, is a scam!

Go with the old saying, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t.”

The harsh reality is, the time when you could make good money through Google ads is over! Still, there are a myriad of websites with slogans like “Work At Home Mom Makes $6,397/Month Part-Time.” If it was true at all, why isn’t everybody doing it? Because it’s a scam! The only ones to create a tremendous income are the scammers!

Well, to show just one example, here is an excerpt/copy of the “Massachusetts Job Report” by “Online 6 News” (Note: The Massachusetts Job Report as well as Online 6 News are a fake.) It’s the “Massachusetts” report, because that’s where I live. The scammers run programs that can determine from where you log in (They look at your IP address) and change the content accordingly.

Work At Home Mom Makes $6,397/Month Part-Time

Online News 6 Investigates Google Work at Home Programs…

Have You Ever Thought About Working Online?

Kelly Richards of Conway, MA never thought she would have a job working at home until one day she filled out a simple form online. Before she knew it, she discovered her secret to beating the recession, and being able to provide for her family while at home with her two children.

I read Kelly’s blog last month and decided to feature her story in our local job report. In our phone interview she she told me her amazing story. “I actually make about $5,000-$7,000 a month using Google. It is enough to comfortably replace my old jobs income, especially considering I only work about 10-15 hours a week from home.

Working with Google has been a financial windfall for Kelly, who struggled for months to find a decent job during the struggling economy. “I lost my job shortly after the recession hit, I needed reliable income, I was not interested in the “get rich quick” scams you see all over the internet. Those are all pyramid scams or stuff where you have to sell to your friends and family. I just needed a legitimate way to earn a living for me and my family. The best part of working online is that I am always home with the kids, I save a lot of money.”

I asked her about how she started her remarkable journey. “It was pretty easy, I filled out a short form and applied for a work at home kit. There is a small shipping and handling fee, its not really free but it was under $5. I got the Kit and within four weeks I was making over $5,000 a month. It’s really simple, I am not a computer whiz, but I can use the internet. I post links that are given to me, I don’t even have to sell anything and nobody has to buy anything. They are constantly recruiting people to post links, you should try it.”

Online giant Google, worth over 100 billion dollars is the most used search engine and internet market place. Google is the #1 internet site in the world, over 50 percent of all internet traffic flows through them everyday. It’s a great company and they have been helping people work at home for over 10 years. Why not get in with the internets best and biggest company? there are plenty of scams on the internet claiming you can make $50,000 a month, but that is exactly what they are scams. From my conversation with Kelly, “I am making a good salary from home, which is amazing, under a year ago I was jobless in a horrible economy. I thank god every day that I filled out that form.”

Quickly, Kelly Richards was able to use the simple Google Profit Library kit with the Google Home Income kit to make it out of the recession.

Kelly had never shared her story before, and with her permission, we are putting it public.

Note: The grammatical errors/flaws are not mine. This was a simple copy and paste. Needless to say that a professional Online report would not be as flawed as this one. Also, to my knowledge, Google does not hire people to put hyperlinks on their blogs.

While these types of fraudulent jobs don’t really exist, there are plenty of jobs arising from online medical billing and coding courses.

How Can I Report Mass-Marketing Fraud?

If you have a complaint about any type of Internet crime, you can file an online complaint with the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). The IC3 is a joint project of the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C). The IC3′s key functions for federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies will be (1) receiving online complaints, (2) analyzing them to identify particular schemes and general crime trends in Internet fraud, and (3) compiling and referring potential Internet fraud schemes to law enforcement. In addition to FBI and NW3C personnel, the IC3 will include agents and analysts detailed from other law enforcement agencies.

If you have a complaint about any type of consumer fraud, including any type of mass-marketing fraud, you can file a complaint through a toll-free Consumer Help Line, 1-877-FTC-HELP (1-877-382-4357) or online with the Federal Trade Commission

Source: U.S. Department of Justice - http://www.justice.gov/criminal/fraud/internet/

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AMERICAN MALE PROSTITUTE
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss 

How I (Almost) Got A Book Deal Through Sex, Lies, And Deceit

Today’s publishing world is divided into two principle sections. First, there is the exclusive pool of traditional publishers, and, second, the help-yourself shark tank represented by the so-called vanity publishers.

Vanity publishers have a significant edge over traditional publishers in regards to brutality, business sense, and profitability. They ruthlessly pursue the infinite supply of aspiring writers who, in turn, are rejected by traditional publishers or literary agents. Ironically, in the world of traditional publishing, authors are rejected not necessarily due to lack of talent. Vanity publishers accept everybody and everything. No questions asked. Just pay your bill, but don’t come crying to them when you can’t sell a copy of your book.

The question remains, what does it take these days to get a book deal with a traditional publisher? What do you do when, hypothetically, you are running out of time and mere talent is not the be-all and end-all?

Stuart Martin Berry has found the answer: If you can’t impress them with your talent, baffle them with your bull-shit. [Read more, including an excerpt]