I will always remember the day when I was at a conference in New York…I believe it was in 2003…and the Yahoo! speaker announced that they would be charging people to get into their directory and then, on top of that initial, yearly, $299 charge, they would also charge a per-click fee every time someone clicked a listing. Imagine that.

Luckily, people booed and that model never went forward.

So now when Yahoo! needs a some more cash, they don’t bother with silly announcements that could get booed. They just get right down to charging their customers. The fine print is in place, it’s all legal, so it must be all good. Oh, how I miss the corporate life and the wonderful decisions that come from a spreadsheet.

There is a reason I don’t advertise with Yahoo!. And I’m really glad I don’t. Because if I were a Yahoo! advertiser, it is likely that they would have already “optimized” my account, like they just did for so many unwitting other accounts, by adding keywords and distribution that results in more exposure, more clicks and higher costs with a complete disregard to relevance and transparency.

The fact that things are technically “legal” doesn’t make them right. There’s no wonder that Yahoo! continues to come up short in their quest to be the leader in online search. They just don’t seem to understand that customers are actually people.

I have been using press releases over the past several months to highlight some major changes that are happening in my company. I have used PrWeb a couple of times as well as Transworldnews. I am also looking into using other services such as prlog.org, eworldwire.com and www.fprc.info.

PrWeb definitely positions itself as the premium service. They charge $200 per release, which is certainly premium and much more than the other services. They do offer a lot of features and have positioned themselves as the authority.

But when I used them to put out a press release regarding the launch of our new website, the release was immediately scraped by PR-USA, a service out of Bulgaria that specializes in scraping (stealing) content and attributing it to themselves. And they are good at scraping (effective, but they suck). Their scraped press release stole the show on Google and the PRweb release was nowhere to be found.

No one has control over Google and I didn’t expect PRweb to flick a switch and make the scraper site go away. But I did talk to their customer service team to raise the issue, especially since one of the main points of the release was “Made in the USA.” A press release from Bulgaria doesn’t exactly help.

PrWeb customer service was apologetic and very nice and suggested I put in a ticket with their product management team to elevate the concern. So I did. The response back was amazing. The product management team didn’t even acknowledge the problem and gave me a bit of a sarcastic reply. Hmmm…a defensive product management team that won’t admit mistakes…sounds familiar.

Here’s part of Chris’ reply from PrWeb:

Again, if your goal is to get your release far and wide on the Internet, then other organizations finding your press release and reposting it is a good practice for you. It just gives you more exposure. If for whatever reason that is not your goal, then perhaps you may want to reconsider posting them on the World Wide Web.

He said, “World Wide Web”.

Gee, thanks Chris. As a seasoned snarkmaster myself, I wasn’t amused. I ended up calling Chris “smarty pants” in my reply and that’s when the management stepped in and offered a sincere reply to my original concerns (i.e. – they’re getting scraped and they don’t like it). Perhaps I will use PRweb again in the future, but for now I can’t justify the expense. Just because something costs more doesn’t mean it comes with higher quality.

I can take my Dell computer with Vista just about anywhere and it easily connects to the wireless network. If I have ever had a problem connecting to an unsecure, public network, I can’t remember when.

But when I come home, inevitably, I have a connection problem. The solution? Like all things Microsoft, a reboot.

I don’t just reboot once. The process is a 3 reboot cycle. Lately, it has taken 4 reboots.

Thanks Microsoft. I could have been sitting in traffic and enjoying the sunshine.

You might have received an email lately, or several of them, that states something like:

Cell phone numbers going public tomorrow

REMINDER….all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies tomorrow and you will start to receive sale calls.

….YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS

Well, according to Snopes, that claim is false. Specifically, it still remains illegal for auto-dialers to call cell phones. There is a drive to have a national cell phone directory service, but it is by opt-in only. Do nothing and you won’t be listed.

Having said that, you can still go to 888-382-1222 to get on the national “Do Not Call” Registry. You can also file complaints there or at donotcall.gov. That should take care of the marketers, or at least most of them. But if you expect to have private cell phone conversations, that’s a different story.

I was at a shower for my sister-in-law this weekend and the topic of conversation turned to my relationship, how I met my wife, etc. Everyone got a good laugh when my wife explained all of the “background checking” she did before we actually went on a date. We started talking about Googling other people and where people rank for themselves, etc. I have an actor/stuntman who ranks higher than myself and I also just noticed another person who shares my name in the top 10. Thankfully, I am not him.

But I couldn’t help but notice the charge. Apparently the man,

filed false and illegal documents to the County Clerk’s office. The taxes did not include his purchase of a brand new boat and truck. Due to this, he failed to pay a total of $2,615.95 of sales tax that was to be paid to the state of Tennessee at the time of the purchases.

So he’s gonna spend a couple of years in jail possibly. Certainly everyone should pay their taxes and tax evaders should be brought inline. But I’m curious why certain people seem exempt from the same crime. For instance, I came across this article that explains how a top contractor for the Defense department has avoided paying ‘hundreds of millions’ of dollars in taxes since 2002. Apparently, setting up an office in the Caymen islands and not paying taxes saves money for the Defense department, and that’s ok.

Meanwhile, John P, my co-top-10 Googlee, is gonna spend some time behind bars. And I’m going to be sure and pay my taxes. The offshore companies in the Caymen islands? Looks like they will continue to employ Americans, get government contracts and somehow help the Defense department by having a higher profit margin. We might as well be paying Exxon to charge us higher gas prices.

Vista came with my new computer, otherwise I would not have stepped in it. When my friend Rusty called me back in the fall to say he un-installed Vista and reinstalled XP-SP2, I knew there was a problem. The Mac commercials accurately poked fun of this phenomenon.

Remember Longhorn? That’s the product Microsoft didn’t release. Looking back at the huge step in technology that was Windows 95, Vista is a joke. It’s amazing that the same company produced both. Apparently many MS executives didn’t like the new OS either. (Use bugmenot.com if password is needed to see article.)

Microsoft made things fancy because they assumed that’s what people wanted. “Pop and sizzle” – I’ve heard that line before. They replaced simple, recessed lighting with a Disco ball. They put spinner wheels and a giant spoiler where it just didn’t belong.

Some things I just can’t make up.

I was sitting and enjoying a nice dinner tonight in Santa Clara when a somewhat geeky guy sits down next to me and begins to shovel his food like a starved man. He had a unique outfit, a European accent and the eyes of a mad scientist. He wasn’t wearing a badge. He was a Google engineer and I knew it.

When he asked me about my work I told him that I dabbled in programming but that I also did SEO consulting. We chatted a bit about C++, Java, Fortran and other mundane things before I asked him, “so, do you work for Google?”. He replied that he did, confirming my suspicions. He said he was an engineer.

I decided to have a little fun and pretend to enlist his help. “So, I want to rank #1 on Google for all queries” I said. “Can you do that for me?”

He looked at me, puzzled. But he seemed to want to give me a real answer. He said, “I can’t do that. Besides, it would crash your servers.”

“Not my servers”, I told him. “I have 2 servers and they’re really big.”

He insisted that it was a bad idea. So I gave in a little. “Ok, how about ranking #1 for most queries?” He still insisted that I wouldn’t get qualified traffic and that my servers would blow. I assured him that both of my servers were top notch.

I handed him my business card and told him that he could think about it and, if he changed his mind, I could take all the traffic from ranking #1 on “the Google”. He looked at me with an uncomfortable grin. And he said, “ok, but I really can’t do that”.

It was fairly obvious, hopefully, that I was joking. At any rate, I saw the engineer later and asked him if he was going to delete me from “the Google” for asking for his help. He assured me, “No, we won’t do that. Google is not evil, really.”

Thank goodness. I’m relieved.

Do you have a website and you’re sick and tired of getting hits and traffic? Are your servers over-worked? Do you have the need to be removed from Google and other imposing search engines? Don’t fret. I have the perfect 2-step solution that is guaranteed to satisfy your need for peace and tranquility.

Step 1: Go to notepad and create a file and name it robots.txt. Put 2 lines of code in that file:
line 1: User-agent: *
line 2: Disallow: /
It should look like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Be sure and use the “/” in your disallow statement or this won’t work! Diligence, my friends.

Step 2: Even though Step 1 should be quite effective, redundancy ensures that you will succeed in protecting your servers from intruding requests. In step two, include the following meta tag in each of your web pages:

meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”

This is your “backup plan”. Don’t confuse yourself and use “index, follow” as that might tell search crawlers to access your content which could cause unnecessary computations on your server due to unwanted site visitors.

Now, sit back and relax. Hear that? Yes, my friends, that’s silence. Sweet sweet silence. You might say that’s just deja-vu all over again.

OH MY!

A couple of weeks ago, I had some fraudulent charges to my credit card so I had to get a new card issued. In the meantime, my XM radio auto-renewal failed because my old credit card no longer worked. They politely sent me an email and I went to update my information. That’s when the trouble began.

After spinning around their site (they require different logins for different activities), I simply could not get to the portion of their site that allows me to update my credit card information. Apparently they have a bug in their system and they are trying to fix it. Fine. So I called customer service….and waited….and waited….

After about 10 minutes, I hung up. I got tired of hearing the happy message telling me that I could not be helped because they were so busy helping new customers.

So this is how I got immediate help – and this works for just about any corporate organization. I went to their corporate website here. I found their corporate phone number and when I was prompted for someone’s extension, I just dialed a random, 4-digit extension. This technique will land you at the desk of someone important 9 times out of 10. This was one of those 9 times.

Within seconds I was placed in the hands of Joan (who even gave me her last name). Joan was so kind and helpful, it was amazing. She even gave me her personal phone number should I have trouble again.

So the next time you’re sitting on hold waiting for an outsourced phone operator to finally get to your call, go look up the corporate number and get an executive on the line. Works every time!