No Free Ericsson Laptops. THIS IS A HOAX...

No Free Ericsson Laptops. THIS IS A HOAX. Google it dammit.There is no person working at Ericsson named "Anna Swelung". They have confirmed that they will not be giving away free anything. So do me a favour and stop sending me this spam. It's junk.

2010 spam emails are coming. I have just...

2010 spam emails are coming. I have just received my first one with thanks to SA Rocks. This is what 2010 Spam looks like:

My name is Mr Ray Edward, I got your website in the internet, when i was searching for a good business partner interconnection to 2010 Fifa world cup that will be hold in your country south africa nest year,Do you know a good profitable business that we can invest? I did it in Germany 2006 and i was favored so much, Get back to me with your kind of investment proposal so that we can proceed now,Yours truelyMr. Ray Edward.

Well Mr. Ray Edward, I have great ideas. Why would I give them to you? And if you are going to pitch me spam, at least try to get the spelling and grammar half-decent, not even all the way decent, just half.

Nedbank client service blows. I have rec...

Nedbank client service blows. I have recently acquired a bond through Nedbank. I am VERY happy about this, they gave me the best rate and the best bond amount hands down. But I don't think that's enough. I wanted someone to phone me, to say well done, to see that I was OK, happy, alive, not robbing them. Etc etc etc. But nothing.Then enter SPAM. I have received two calls on two consecutive days from Nedbank client service research people asking me to participate in feedback client something-or-another. I told them my story and declined to participate. I also asked them to remove me from their database. Let's hope.

HSBC hit by email spammer?

I just received this in my Gmail account:

Good day,My name is Maria Norwood;I work with the Total Quest Services,a consulting Firm in London,UK. We are conducting a standard process investigation involving a client who shares the samename with you andalso the circumstances surrounding investments made by this client at HSBCBank Plc.The HSBC Private Banking client died intestate and nominated no next of kin toinherit the title over the investments made with HSBC Bank Plc.The essence of thiscommunication with you is to request that you provide us information on three issues:1-Are you aware of any relative/relation having the same surname, whose last known contactaddress was Madrid, Spain?2-Are you aware of any investment of considerable value made by such a person at the HSBCBank Plc.?3-Can you establish beyond reasonable doubt your eligibility to assume status of next of kinto the deceased?It is pertinent that you inform us ASAP whether or not you are familiar with this personalitythat we may put an end to this communication with you and our inquiries surrounding thispersonality.You must appreciate that we are constrained from providing you with more detailedinformation at this point. PLEASE RESPOND BACK TO MY PRIVATE AND DIRECT EMAIL ADDRESS;mrs.mariawood@gmail.com as soon as possible to afford us the opportunity to close thisinvestigation.Thank you for accommodating our enquiry.Yours sincerely,Maria NorwoodTotal Quest ServicesFor: HSBC Private Clients.This is a confidential message from Total Quest Services

Something smells fishy.

Banned from Google and back on in 2 days

I have had a roller coaster ride experience with Google. Spanning from utter reverence to complete disdain, to fear, concern, joy, revolution and many more experiences that all have left me with an impression of Google here or there.My most recent experience of Google was a two day festival of emotion and reactions.Many people wont have a clue what I am referring to here but I recently saw a serious drop in traffic on SA Rocks:Those red arrows...never good. I freaked out. Emailed people, tried removing things I thought might be problematic. And then Mr Jason Bagley tweeted the answer in geniously casual fashion: "check out Google Webmaster tools - might be able to spot something happening in there."Yes, the answer was there. SA Rocks has a problem. I am not going go in to much detail other than to say that thousands of invisible links are injected in to the SA Rocks template occasionally. I didn't even remember this issue and consider it a problem. But it was. Google had booted me off their indexes. Not. Good.The drop in traffic is the result of having every page, every search term, every SEO effort that you have put in for over two years vanish off Google. Gone, kaput, over. Again, I freaked out. This is where the angst, anger, frustration and a mass of other emotions began to flow. I hated Google. I hated the fact they could almost literally grind my hard work to halt by simply removing me from their service. It's a shocker. And they are strict. If you haven't made use of them yet, I suggest you head over and get on top of Google's webmaster tools. They will prove to be invaluable should you one day be booted off Google.I received a message in my Webmaster Dashboard alerting me to the fact that I had been removed from Google. I then Googled SA Rocks, South Africa Rocks, Rocking, SA or anything that I knew would pop SA Rocks on to the top of the ranking somewhere on Google. Nada. Nothing. Niks nie. Kak myself.But it wasn't too bad.I was alerted to the problem by the helpful text-person talking to me on my dashboard. I figured it out, invisible links, google, spam, bam. Went to the origin of the links, manually removed them and then applied to be reevaluated by Google. This is an absolute must if you ever want to be visible on the known web again.Then I honestly thought that I would be waiting for weeks. But I didn't I waited for two days and was reinstated to the Google Indexes. Thank goodness. Can't tell you how glad I am that this is over.Be sure to check up on your website, Google yourself, your websites and your profiles.

Rap on the knuckles from Facebook

Anyone ever received one of these?Think at the point of receiving the error I was posting a link to WhyVOTE? to a group. Oh well.

Spam is spam... yes you

Have you ever noticed how some folk will moan about spam but them send 10,000 people "something valuable". I have news for you, spam is spam. You are not above it all and your promotion is the same as everyone elses, shameless and spam.

Twam - The new spam from twitter

Spam is everywhere, it's mass, it's personal, it's viral and now it's on Twitter. Twam is really baffling me and consuming a fair amount of my strategic thought.I am trying to understand a few things:1. How do these twammers choose who they are going to follow to make up the 20 000th follower.2. What value does it offer them? If I don't follow them I can't see what they tweet.3. Are they real people who have actually clicked "Follow" 20 000 times?4. Why would you follow and receive updates from twammers?Let me explain; a twammer by my definition is someone who insists on following thousands of people and in return hopefully get a percentage of those people following them.Example:This personAnd this personAnother form of Twam is the constant links that are posted from people promoting their blogs. Mass twammers who follow thousands of people are the worst sort of link-twam posters. It's frustrating.I am all for posting links to your blogs if they relate to the current discussion or if you genuinely feel that people will find it of interest, but don't twam me with every post. I have been trying out twitlink-something-or-other (there are too many apps nowaday to rememeber all their names). I don't like it and will be removing it soon as I can remember where it is!Basically I just don't know how it is that I am lucky enough to be chosen by people like the two above as someone worth twamming. Is it when you reach a certain number of followers? Is it location driven, can they possibly be following your content and think you have a common ground? Surely not. Whichever it is, leave me alone.

How you know you're not NB in your friends mailing lists

When those spammy, mass, rubbish emails that state that you MUST send this mail on to 10-gazillion people or face a frightening and certain death consisting of horns, the devil, skin-melting-torture and any other rubbish...are sent to you.

Guilt spam is the new black

Another great spam comment left on this blog:

sveta | mai1n@yandex.com | bestcamaro.info/eureka-tent | IP: 84.122.3.45Please, do not delete the given message. Money obtained from spam will go to the help hungry to children ugand.

Isn't that wonderful? Spammers are now giving their self-confessed spam money to children in ugand, not Uganda, but ugand. Wonderful, I feel better now, let's pollute the internet and my blog with your drivel.

Funniest spam comment in my site yet

This is a spam comment I received today:

This website is very nice and colorful too. Its nice to have something to show others where you attend church and to show all the smiling people filled of the goodness of the Lord. You have a wonderful website here. May God rich bless you always.

Those of you who know me and read this blog will clearly understand the humour. If you don't understand it might be worth searching for religion in my archives and you'll get it.

Homemark spam scam continued

A few months back I posted about Homemark scamming/spamming me over SMS.Surprisingly months later I am still getting comments on this post from more and more people feeling the same way (OK and one dude who actually wasted R99 on a prize he won, some knives!).So I decided that I needed to use my skills and get some more out this issue. I have emailed Homemark about the issue, my blog post and the over twenty people who agree with me and feel spammed. Let's wait and see what they have to say.If you have been scammed or spammed in a similar way, please comment on this post and lets build up as many complaints as possible.

Google penalties can be lifted

A few weeks ago I posted about David Airey's Google penalty.He has just updated that post noting that the penalty was lifted and his Google rank has shot up and his hits have subsequently reflected this.Read his post and then continue reading this one.After reading his post a few things came to mind. Firstly Google Pagerank and search results are absolutely imperative to a successful blog. No shit. Secondly, to a certain extent Google can and does restrict bloggers, whether this is conscious or subconscious it is still happening.David is the perfect example and now I am questioning my tactics and what I do on my blogs.My concern is for SA Rocks. I ran a badge competition a while back and when the winner was announced I hoped that people would use the badge on their sites to show support for SA and how much it rocks. Simple.But is it possible that I could receive a penalty? Oh, wait, can I even blog about this or will it alert google's spam team to what I have done?There are ethics involved ofcourse. They must surely and hopefully do take in to account the intention of the blogger when he/she "broke" the rules.The last problem or concern I have with all of this is exactly what counts as "Black hat SEO" and exactly what is a "bad neighbourhood" to link to?There are some links that David provides to try and help with these issues; here and here

Name and shame Muti spammers

I have been harping on about this topic recently. But the debate isn't closed in my mind at all.I concede that there is definite value in self promotion when the post is relevant, well written and valuable. Let me just say that NO ONE has ever written 100% of their posts to be 100% relevant to everyone at all times. So if you are submitting ALL of your post ALL of the time ONLY then you are spamming. Simple.You might disagree and that is your prerogative. You might even think that no one does that, let me prove that there are users on muti who are doing that:anjamerret:newscribe:iz4u:guymclaren:guymclaren is a bit of a tricky situation, there is a lot of self promotion that borders on spam but not only from his one blog, from various blogs he owns and others. In my mind, this counts to a degree.And just for good measure, some of my own muti submissions:I have submitted the occasional SA Rocks post but none that I personally wrote and they are few and far between one another.What I am basically saying is that there is spam around and it is very present and people are not voting it down because not many people actually take not of who has previously submitted posts from which blogs and how often. This is why I think spammers should be made known.Do you know of any others?

The plan is here, it's voting time

I mentioned that I would be coming up with some sort of a plan. I have struggled and battled with internal strife and maintained my dignity - to some extent. Here is the plan for now:Gather a group of like minded bloggers (by that I mean bloggers who are tired of spammers on muti and self-promoting-spammers - SPS - on muti). Get these bloggers to vote down Spam and SPS on muti.Now you might ask who gets to decide what is spam and what is SPS? That's a good question. But let's rather ask: What makes spammers think that they can use muti as a service to spam me?I have spoken to Robert and a few others bloggers who are keen.The simple process is this: Spot a post on muti that is excessive self-promotion or spam and vote it down. Then comment on the muti post with "SPAM" for spam posts and "SELF PROMOTION" for excessive self promotion.I think that it is ok to promote your own sites or posts to an extent. It is when this self promotion becomes excessive and meaningless link-baiting, that it becomes spam. Simple.So, if you are interested in joining us on our voting down syndicate, please email me and let me know!Here goes...

Voting, ranking and rating is getting to me

I have a plan, it's a cunning stunt that will cripple any and all voting, ranking and rating systems or sites. It will work. You will see. Spammers and everyone else for that matter will suffer.You will know when it is in place, wait, maybe not.

The Muti model and Zoopy spam

Recently I have been making use of muti alot. I am not sure what marked my return but I am thoroughly enjoying the site. That was up until today's abuse (and a fair amount this week) of the service by Zoopy. Within an hour Zoopy had voted themselves on the the muti charts over 5 times (it is against the rules to have more than 5 submissions (to the same hostname) inan hour).This really got my goat so I took it upon myself to let Neville know about this. Neville is great and responded fairly quickly to my irritation with feelings of agreement and frustration. He is at a bit of a loss about what to do with potential spammers, spammers and general wrong-doing. He asked me what my opinion was and I was also at a bit of a loss.My suggestion is to open it up to the people using muti. This is the purpose of this blog post. I want to know what you all think a possible solution to the above-mentioned problem could be. But first let me actually elaborate a bit more from Neville's perspective:

Remember that muti started out as an experimentto see if a reddit like site could work in a regional contextsuch as South Africa. For this type of site to work it needs 3things:1) a sustainable # of active member2) a suatainable # of submissions3) voter participationMy assesment is that muti has 1) and 2)but on 3) there are not enough people participatingIt is to me a very interesting question as to whySouth Africans are not participating in 3)

I think that Neville has stumbled upon an extremely interesting and poignant issue here. Participation. Participation is absolutely crucial to the success of this sort of site as well as just about any web 2.0 endeavour.One of the solutions brought up is to weight voting according to reliability of user, length of time a user has been registered, reputation, k-index, kudus and/or number of submission to muti. But writing this post I think that a better way to solve the problem is to possibly find a way to incentivise people to get involved and vote the good stories up and the rubbish, boring, old, irritating zoopy spam down (OK enough zoopy bashing, sometimes they post good stuff).So, what do you think a possible solution is? And how do we prevent the muti elite from taking over the world?

RSS Blogs Publishing Other Peoples Blog Posts

I have recently noticed that pingbacks I am receiving on many of my posts are from blogs that are simply ripping off RSS from various other blogs that they can get their grubby paws on to. Can anyone explain this to me??Here is a list of a couple that I have noticed:http://www.rss.markpromotion.com/camel-gets-some-flavour.htmlhttp://thedrunkkansan.com/music/?p=6083http://thedrunkkansan.com/hottness/2007/04/09/stop-twittering-you-twit-live-your-life/http://www.rss.wineflavour.com/sa-cookbook-wins-food-and-wine-oscar.htmlhttp://www.rss.romanianfootball.com/football-hooliganism-makes-football-watchable.htmlhttp://world-beaches.biz/best-beaches-in-sa/UPDATE:Thanks to grandMasterkrust, I have found and installed a few plugins that will hopefully be solutions to an apparently large problem. Go figure. Check out these links if you are experiencing the same problem as I have been:http://www.plagiarismtoday.comhttp://redalt.comhttp://www.numly.com

Kumomo - Spamvertising Gets Personal

I just received this email from a "revolutionary advertising option for blogs":Dear Nic Haralambous,First of all, allow us to come clean. We've got your email contact from your blog, Media Madness & Everyday Mayhem at http://www.nicharalambous.com. We apologize shall this email cause any interference and we will make this message short and simple.We would like to share with you the launching of Kumomo.com, an online ad space booking platform, where you can sell the spaces on your blog. Sounds familiar to what you've experienced? Almost, but not exactly.This is the place where advertisers come looking for your space. There is no cost in posting your ad space here (it's free!) and fees from the advertiser goes direct to you! No Commission, No Cash Holdback, Free Exposure.If you have never sold space before, or don't intend to be flooded with sponsored banners? Here, you have the option to donate all the ad space proceedings to Cambodian Build A School Project. Be part of the Kumomo Tree Charity Project, www.kumomo.com/kumomo-tree, and bring a smile to the Cambodian kids.Kindly log on to www.kumomo.com/publisher to start selling your ad space.Best regards,YongKumomo.com - Got Space?I am impressed with the personalised touch, but if I wanted to sell ads I would be doing so. Should this be taken as a compliment? Is it really possible that a company would make real people (not bots) troll sites and get details from the sites to send a pitch to? I am again, impressed by the effort if this is the case. I am not sold however. Thanks Kumomo.com, but no thanks.

SMS spam out of control - Homemark

I have already posted about spam on this blog. Email spam and SMS spam, email being the focus. But now it has really reached epic proportions. Not a day goes by when I don't get SMS'd about winning something stupid, paying someone stupid or someone stupid bugging me.I need to ask a very serious and honest question: Where do these people get my number from?Today it was my brother who was SMS'd the following:

CONGRATULATIONS you have won an INFLATABLE BED from HOMEMARK. To Claim your prize call 011 430 6000 quote ref: xxxxxx. Terms & Con apply.Reply NO to be removed.

Now notice how they abbreviated "conditions" to "Con" ironic hey? Then they do mention that I can reply NO to be removed, but they haven't said from what? If I have honestly won something why would they be giving me the option to be removed?I called the number and this is what they wanted:Me: Hi I've won a bed.Call Assistant: Wonderful sir, our winning caller lines are busy please could I have your name and number for our database so that we can call you back?Me: No thank you, I just want my bed.Call Assistant: Yes sir, but I will need your name and number so that we can call you back.Me: Speaking of my number, where did you get it?Call Assistant: One of your friends or family must have provided your details when they bought something from us.Me: Well I don't agree with that.Call Assistant: If you give me your number sir, I can remove it from our database.Me: Yes thanks.Call Assistant: Thank you sir.What a scam! All they were after was my name and number, there was no bloody bed. Homemark is all over the TV all bloody day, is that not bad enough? Now I need to be spammed when I'm not watching TV too?

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