Spammer has to pay AOL $5 Million

Christopher William Smith of Prior Lake, Minnisota, a sleeze if there ever was one, lost the suit brought by AOL against him for sending out billions of spams. I hope he sits in prison for a long time too. People like this make it very difficult for honest companies to do business on the web. Marketing by email is now virtually useless because of crooks like Christopher William Smith. I’d like to propose to our government to make spamming a federal crime, and let them do hard time. Twenty-five years in prison, and the whole time spent reading spam emails. Nothing else.

Talking to the old economy about blogging

I just wanted to make not of this interesting perspective on talking to an old economy company about how blogging can help their business. Is it really so easy?

Search Engine Optimization Magazine Launching in May

Here’s an interesting tidbit I found on SEO Roundtable. Seems if you subcribe before February 28th, you get the first year for free. Here’s a link to their site. http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com

Yahoo Gives Up?

I saw this noted at Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion Blog. According to an article syndicated by Bloomberg, Yahoo’s CFO Susan Decker said that Yahoo does not have a goal of being the number one search engine.

I just have to say, it’s a stupid thing to say. Even if they believed that they could not match Google in terms of market share, Yahoo should still strive to be number one in terms of quality. To just give up like that really doesn’t make sense. What makes it even more stupid is that Decker stated that they’d be happy to stay at their current level of market share. Well, how do they expect to maintain market share now that they’ve admitted they suck and that they don’t even have any plans of trying to do as well as Google? Why would they expect people to come back to their site when they’re searching for something when that’s their attitude?

Exactly what business is Yahoo! in anyway? It makes me wonder. Clearly they don’t consider themselves a search company. They do a lot more than that. Google is going that direction as well. I think it’s easy for a giant like Yahoo! to get lost, to lose its personality. What are they good at? Anything? They try to do so many things that perhaps they suck at everything. It’s just the massive amounts of traffic to their site keeping them alive at all. When you’re a small business, on the other hand, it’s absolutely critical to be able to effectively define yourself. A small business could never afford to let it be known that they do not aspire to be the best in category. Time will show how will it effect Yahoo!.

It’s already old news

Sure there are 10,000 copycats already, as Seth Godin points out. I’d say, it’s more about originality than about rules though. Originality is independent of rules. You can be original without making a new rule or you can be original and create a whole new way of doing business. The Million Dollar Homepage, or whatever the heck it was called, was obviously a flash-in-the-pan. How could it not be? It creates no value to the customer. But Seth is right, there are bottom dwellers out there that will copy any idea. Just look at Ebay. Pretty much any category, but take a look at the websites for sale category some day when you’re feeling very bored. Not only will you now see legions of coppies of the Million Dollar Homepage, you’ll see copies of copies of some of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever seen. The easier it is to copy, the more of them you’ll see.

Top Five Mistakes People Make Launching a New Website

#5: Believing that “if you build it they will come” applies to all websites.
#4: Spamming for traffic.
#3: Using a crappy domain name.
#2: Not targeting your niche well enough.
#1: Paying too much for a lousy web design.

Read
more about my thoughts on these topics at the Small Business Forum

BroadVoice - Worst Voip Service

I’m always happy to give a small startup the benefit of the doubt, and give them a chance. So, I signed up with BroadVoice instead of Vonage. Mistake. I estimate about 50% of the calls we attempted through BroadVoice wouldn’t go through. When we did get a call through, we received complaints from the people on the other end of the call regarding the quality of the service. When I contacted BroadVoice about their service the response time was just silly. I receved a response to one of my emails after four months. MONTHS! Why they even bothered to reply at that point is the silly part. To add insult to injury, when I disconnected my service with them, they told me if I didn’t return the device they’d charge me $50. Well, silly me, when I paid them much more than that in setup fees, I figured the cost of the device must have been included in that. So, I returned it. What else would I do with it anyway? So, instead of charging me $50 they’re now saying they’ll charge $11 instead because I returned it in the wrong box! I’m using Vonage now, and am happy I made the switch. Should have done it a long time ago.

Bush Wants to Violate my Fourth Ammendment Rights? And Yours too!

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The authors of the Constitution were very wise to include this. I have no words to describe the lack of respect I have for Bush for such a massive attempt to violate my Constitutional rights. Yours too, if you’re a US citizen that is. I search Google every day. President Bush wants Google to hand over records of all requests for a randomly specified week. I can’t remember a day when I haven’t done a Google search, let alone a whole week. In effect, Bush wants to violate my rights.

All Nixon did was have some of his goons break into a hotel room. Bush wants to break into millions of people’s private records. I feel like vomiting.

More people who’ve written about this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/technology/20google.html
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/01/20/MNGEVGQED31.DTL
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blogs/gelman/archives/003720.shtml
http://battellemedia.com/archives/002249.php
http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002534.html
http://belowbeltway.blogspot.com/2006/01/getting-news-wrong.html
http://www.sharpseo.com/blog/index.php/archives/8
http://hotchic.wordpress.com/2006/01/20/ny-times-google-porn-privacy-article/
http://cypherjf.sscentral.com/2006/01/20/rock-on-google/
http://varun.vk123.com/2006/01/20/yahoo-gave-search-data-to-bush-administration/
http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2006/01/government_vs_g.html
http://blog.braverman.org/PermaLink,guid,67b6c1f5-ff63-4469-b2f7-4621ac8fde60.aspx
http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2006/01/do_no_evil_and_1.html

That’s just a random sampling of people who’ve blogged about this topic this morning. Technorati lists thousands of posts on the subject already! I might add more later.

The Fix is In

If you believe Steelers linebacker Joey Porter, the NFL is about as legit as professional wrestling. According to Porter, the world wanted the Colts to win so the refs tried to rig the game by making bad calls. It reminds me of something I read in Freakonomics.

In Freakonomics, the authors write about an entrepreneur who starts up a bagel delivery service. The idea of the company is to deliver bagels to business offices so the employees don’t need to go out to buy their snacks. The owner of the service received payment on the honor system, leaving a collection box for people to put in a dollar for each bagel taken. The owner of the delivery service kept meticulous records of how many bagels were eaten versus how many dollars were put into the collections box.

To summerize the results, the important part of them anyway, the larger the corporation and the higher up the corporate ladder the customer was, the more likely they were to cheat the delivery service out of that dollar. I think this is astonishing. Who could better afford that dollar for a bagel than a corporate executive? The authors of Freakonomics make some interesting speculations based on the data, that these dishonest corporate execs perhaps rose up the ladder as a result of their dishonesty. That they felt a certain sense of entitlement, as powerful corporate executives, that they deserved the free bagel. Also, that cheating is far more acceptible in larger corporations than in small business.

Another interesting thing I’ve read in a few places recently is moanings from small business owners about how slow large corporations are with paying, and how large corporations often quibble over the bill. The remarkable point that several of those complainers made was that they were afraid to complain or stand up to justify increased charges because they feared that the large corporate customer would take their business elsewhere.

How do I draw a line between these bits of information? When you’re a small business servicing a large corporation, you should be even more vigilent about standing up for yourself than with other customers. I can easily believe that people in larger corporations are more likely to cheat. I’ve seen it enough times, with my own eyes. When you let them take the first liberty, perhaps they’re slow with paying a bill, paying after 90 days when your contract said net 30. When you let them do that, you’ve lost the war. They know they have the upper hand, that you need them more than they need you. If that’s the case, get out of the business.

Yep, you heard me, get out of the business. You have a faulty business plan. You should aspire to be in the position of providing a service that your clients need. Not on that, but that they get a better value from you than they could get elsewhere. There’s the key. Value. When your corporate clients play games with you like slow payments and shorting your bills, they’re telling you that they don’t value your services very highly. They may as well get the same service somewhere else. That’s too weak of a position to be in, for any business owner. Sell your business now. Close it down while you still have a shirt to wear. Move on.

Use Subscriptions to Reduce Collections Headaches

Andrew Neitlich who blogs at Sitepoint wrote an article today about eliminating payment hassles using subscriptions. This is something I’ve been doing for a good many months, the only difference being he uses 1shoppingcart and I’ve been using mostly Paypal.

For people who use Paypal, it’s very easy to set up short-term subscriptions. Just log into Paypal, go into the merchant tools area, and look for the bit on subscriptions. It will walk you through the process, you just fill in a few fields, and it will give you a link or a button to show to your customers. It’s saved me a hundred headaches.

Good tip Andrew.

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