YouTube, Depeche Mode and Infringement of Crap

I am really mad! Things get worse more and more. I still did not have the time to write my planned article about the current issues with the existing copyright laws and their inadequacy for the real social web world of today.

I am staring since Saturday at a suspended YouTube account of mine (my main one at YouTube.com/CarstensVlog). I cannot log-in to the account to check messages etc. and all of my 160+ videos under the account are not accessible.


The "nice" thing is that YouTube did not even bother to send me a notification about this. They just suspended the account. I wrote them an Email and also sent a fax asking why my account was suspended and that they enable it again. I got a few hours earlier an email from YouTube about the removal of one of my videos due to infringing the copyright of Depeche Mode. I had six Depeche Mode videos uploaded under my account, five of them were the different music video and live versions of my favorite DM song "Never Let Me down Again". The Sixth song was the 1988 live version of "Everything Counts" at the Rose bowl in Pasadena. They were all added to my account about 9 months ago.

One of the DM videos was already taken down in March (3 months ago) where I asked YouTube who exactly claimed the copyright and requested to take the video down. I also asked to get a copy of the 72 user comments the video had acquired that I can send it to the band and ask them, if this is what they consider infringement of their copyright and harming their record, video or concert ticket sales?

YouTube was not willing (or able, or both) to provide me with those comments.

And now also the take-down of the second video and to top it all off, the suspension of my YouTube.com account. Are all my videos infringing copyrights? "No" and "Jain". The "Jain" could be made a "Yes" technically, but if a TV station grabs a promo video of somebody and airs it without asking for permission, that somebody is very unlikely to sue the TV station for copyright infringement... more of the opposite would be true, that somebody would probably be thrilled and happy. It's like writing a press release and a newspaper actually picks it up and publishes it. I am surprised that marketing material (which is intended to expose as much people as possible to) is not automatically treated like a press release, but I am not a lawyer to be able to answer that question.

Guess what, YouTube, who is quick to take crap down without checking is always slow when it comes to responding to the inquiries and communication of the content publisher. This is not the first time. YouTube took down in the past a video from a different YouTube account of mine on behalf of a company who did not own any rights on the video at all. The video recording of the MS DOS PC demo was released under what we call today "creative commons", but without using the legal gibberish. Back when it was released, creative commons did not yet exist as far as I know. In that case YouTube did also not bother to respond to or put the video back up. I re-uploaded it again with a nasty message to the ownership-thief to check first that you really own anything about a video before you claim it to be your own.

I am also mad at Depeche Mode, who I expected to know better than this.I used to be a MySpace friend of the band and sent them a long message via the MySpace mail system yesterday. They have probably their henchmen reading the messages for them and give a crap about the rant and unhappiness of a 22 years long fan of the band. At least Ronan from VNV Nation is reading and responding to his messages personally. I also talked to Ronan and Mark from VNV about copyright stuff and they are much more realistic and relaxed about this.

I will now post my message to Depeche Mode that I sent yesterday at MySpace, before I removed myself from their MySpace Friends list.

Subject: Disappointed and Pissed off, thank you and well done

I made all video versions of my favorite song of yours "Never let me down again" available on YouTube in shitty 320x240 resolution. I took it from ALL your concert and singles DVDs that I own. I also added some personal comments and details to the description to express my support and love for you.

The videos attracted many comments and multiple discussions and sharing of memories and experiences. Really good and heartwarming stuff.

On April 25, 2008 was the first video taken down, the 1987 singles version, after being up for over 6 months and attracting 72 comments (real comments, no junk and no spam). YouTube stated that "Depeche Mode" was claiming the material being infringing.

I am sure that you never looked at the published video yourself. I even doubt that your henchmen look at the stuff and simply filtered videos by name.

Yesterday was the live version from 2005 taken down (Touring the Angel, Live in Milan). That is not all, my account at YouTube was suspended yesterday too, My account with over 160+ videos and only 6 of those were Depeche Mode videos. Now all of my videos are inaccessible. I did not get an email about the suspension. The last email that I got was the info that "Depeche Mode" claimed that the video (Never Let me down again, Live 2005) is infringing and taken down.

This is f(self-censored)king* great!!!

*I don't use the "f" word lightly; it’s the second time within the past 12 months actually. The last time before now was when I got my Green Card after living for over 7 years in the United States, with a short break, where I was forced to leave the country, because I ran out of a visa because it reached and exceeded its maximum lifespan... I wanted to let you know this to put things into the right perspective.

What do you think was happening to your content? Do you seriously believe that you lost any album sales, let alone concert ticket sales as a result of the fan postings of low resolution videos of a song of yours on a video sharing site?

Looking at the responses and comments, I'd say it did the opposite. You probably had album, video and ticket sales as a result of this. I was asked to post other songs and versions of your music. I only did it for one song, the Everything Counts version of 101. I declined the other requests and responded with the info which DVD the song is on and where to get it.

I cannot believe it that I was a fan of yours since 1986 when I was still living in East Germany and thought that it will be the end of the world, because I could not get a ticket to your one concert in East Berlin in 1987 (at the Werner Seelenbinder Halle) and believed that I would never be able to see you live. Well, fortunately for me the Berlin Wall did come down 2 years later. Who’d known? A friend of mine spent the equivalent of over 4 months salary of an average East German worker to buy off a ticket from one of the guys who got a ticket. My friend was 14 t that time, I was 13. The tickets to that concert were not sold. They were given for the most part to schools and they gave it to "exemplary" good students (Depeche Mode fan or not). Most of your real fans never had a chance to get a ticket. They had to buy it off from the "good" students for small fortunes. Not many had that kind of money, I certainly didn't even own 4 months of salary of an adult at that time.

What I have (and still have, shipped from Germany to California) is the original and only published Vinyl record with Depeche Mode songs in East Germany by "Amiga". You have no idea how hard it was to get that.

But all that is now past and you could file it under teenage stupidity or whatever you want. I am now thinking about throwing away all my Cd's and DVDs and even that damn Amiga Vinyl record of yours, considering your attitude towards your fans who do nothing more than evangelize your music and promote your albums, videos and concerts by publishing low quality version of your music and concert videos.

Good Job.

I will now remove you from my MySpace friends; however, I always had an open profile that allows messages to be sent to me, even if you are not a friend of mine.

It does probably also not matter, because I don't think that any of you even bother to read your own emails and have just another henchman do it for you and file this message under "rants"... done, thank you very much. We appreciate your damn money and business, but give a crap about you and your stupid personal problems with us.

Bye
a former Depeche Mode Fan.
1986 (starting with "A Question of Time") to 2008 (ending with infringing on your shit)

So... that was that. Now I still have to battle with YouTube to get my account back up again. That I am not just full of s... and make up an issue where there isn't one can be seen, if you have a look what else is going on at YouTube and other social media sharing sites. The Prince vs. Radiohead incident for example speaks volumes, all by itself.

I will not go further into details with this post. There is a lot more to say and to point out to make you understand the whole extend of this problem. I got to start working on my post, dang it. :)

There is only one last thing that I would like to mention. The purpose of the Copyright law is to protect content producers from rip-offs and not getting paid for their work appropriately when they should. It also prevents the commercial exploit of somebody’s intellectual and creative property, leaving the creator out of it. The law does not exist to be self serving. If a law is either not sufficient to do what it was created for or if it harms somebody else or does not cover relevant scenarios that are becoming norm and not exception, then a change of that laws become necessary or they will create more and more harm and less and less good.


Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Nobody will get killed at Affiliate Summit, WTF?

I decided to make this post at my personal blog and not at ReveNews.com or Search Engine Journal. This story is definitely not worth it and getting more people spending time on it than there already are does not help anybody or chances anything. I also "nofollowed" a bunch of links in the post to prevent that I pass any SEO value to those content, if this is only a dirty "link baiting" scam.

I wanted to leave a comment at Shoemoney's blog, but he disabled comments for some reasons. I wasn't aware of the post and the discussions that surrounded it a few weeks ago, because I was busy with getting my two laptops up and running again.

Let me take a step back and tell you about the background story of this a little bit. I was at Affiliate Summit West 2008 in Las Vegas in February and had a great time. There was obviously an incident at the ShareASale "Under the stars" party at the Palms hotel and casino that I was not aware of. I was at the party, but did not notice what was going there at one point in time, which had to do with the behavior of some of the guests at that party.

There were some kids from an upstart company, including its CEO and co-founders, called Tatto Media (yes, only one "o", it's an intended typo) who had a few drinks too much and started sexual harass some of the women at the party, which is illegal in the United States. The guys were eventually kicked out of the place and that was it.

The sinners and 2007 Finalists: Best Young Entrepreneurs by BusinessWeek; Lee Brown, 23; Lucas Brown, 23; Lin Miao, 20 years old of Tatto Media.

Details emerged later, after the event at the ABestWeb affiliate marketing forums (a thread with the title "Tatto Media - Idiots at Sagamore/Shareasale Party"), where several eyewitnesses stated their experience and opinion about the inappropriate behavior of those young men.

The boys are obviously famous and nominated for a Business Week award for entrepreneurs and start-up companies, which created an even bigger backlash for them. To make a long story short, Shawn Collins, co-founder of Affiliate Summit stepped in and stated that this company is banned from all future Affiliate Summit events. That might be a bit too harsh the one or the other might say, but that is not what I wanted to debate about today.

Following the discussion was a blog post by Jeremy Shoemaker at his blog Shoemoney.com with the title "How Long until Someone Is Killed at an Affiliate Summit". Those are very strong words. Jeremy who did not attend this Affiliate Summit talked about this incident and claims that this event attracts all the scum and thugs of the affiliate marketing industry, which makes the whole event not only unpleasant, but dangerous, where you have to fear for your health and life, on top of that.

The statements he made seem to be the living proof of the existence of parallel universes, because the event he describes is by no means the event that I encountered three times already. I didn't only feel safe, but also in good company. I met many new and pleasant people and did not come across any of the thugs and scoundrels Jeremy was talking about.

Some others made similar contradicting statements in the comments of Jeremy's blog post while comments were still open. I could not understand why Jeremy would make such statements in public, knowing that he causes direct damage to the reputation of the whole event and not only deter potential attendees, but also casts just another negative shadow over the industry as a whole as if we did not have enough problems already.

I thought that Jeremy did not attend Affiliate Summit because of the overlap with the SMX West event in Santa Clara. I decided for Affiliate Summit versus SMX and thought that he decided for SMX. This is obviously not the case and things seem to be running a bit deeper.

I have a feeling that the story with Wickedfire forums from early February plays a role in all this. Jon, the owner of the forums did a rant about "super affiliates" like John Chow, Amit Mehta, Zac Johnson and specifically Jeremy Shoemaker, titled "John Chow, Shoemoney, Super Affiliate Mindset Camels".

The write-up was bad enough to cause Jeremy to involve his legal counsel and send out a Cease and Desist letter to Jon Fisher (You can learn more about that at the Geekcast podcast from February 2008, Shoemoney vs. WickedFire and the cease and desist order of Jeremy against Jon Fisher.). I don't know for sure and have no hard evidence to back it up, but I cannot get rid of that feeling that tells me that this must have something to do with what Jeremy wrote.

I only fail to be able to make the connection between Jon Fisher from Wickedfire and Shawn Collins or Missy Ward from Affiliate Summit that would be reason enough for Jeremy for trying to damage the Affiliate Summit conference as a whole.

For everybody out there who comes across this post of mine and read the post by Jeremy, I can tell that fear to attend Affiliate Summit is completely unnecessary and not warranted. As in every big city are there places and people you don't want to surround yourself with, if you prefer to stay out of trouble, but to avoid this is a choice everybody has to make for himself. I am looking forward to the next Affiliate Summit, August 10 - 12, 2008 at the Seaport Hotel in Boston, MA.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Googlefight - Karsten vs Carsten

I stumbled across a funny gimmick tool via the John Andrew's "SEO Secrets" page (which is also funny). It is called Googlefight.com.

John used it to demonstrate that Black Hat SEO is winning the Google game over White Hat SEO. Well according to Google fight it does hehe.

How does the tool work? Simple, you enter any two phrases into the specifically designed form at Googlefight.com and the tool will check the Google search results for each of the two phrases to see which one has a higher figure for estimated number pages found in the Google index. The phrase where Google returns a higher estimate wins. That's it, no more and no less.

Just for the fun of it did I initiate a Googlefight between "Carsten" and "Karsten", which are both comon spellings of my first name. I always thought that Karsten is the more widely used spelling than how my first name is spelled, "Carsten", with "C" and not a "K" at the beginning. So I was a bit surprised about the Googlefight results, which shows "Carsten" as the winner with 11,7000,000 results versus 8,080,000 for "Karsten". This is a clear victory by over 3,000,000 pages.



I don't think that my internet activities, which contribute a large number alltogether might caused this unexpected result, but hey, even I did not produce 3,000,000+ pages with my name written on it hehe.

Or how about a battle between "ansi art" and "ascii art"? Well, said and done. I knew already who would win this one, ASCII art of course with 2,030,000 versus just a meager 419,000 for ANSI art.



or how about AMIGA demos versus PC demos? A classic :).



Oh, I thought PC demos would win by a much higher margin than that. Maybe I underestimated the power of the Commodore AMIGA hehe.

Okay, enough of this! Well, it has been fun. Try it out yourself and fight out some "battles" of your own. :)

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Wikipedia NOFOLLOW Argumentation - A View Back

This was a scrap or stub on my Cumbrowski.com site with the title "What the F**k is REL=NO FOLLOW?" for a while and I decided that I remove it from there. Wikipedia is now using nofollow and the discussion is a thing of the past. However, the argumentations are still valuable as long as there is the rel=nofollow attribute out there.

I decided to post the discussion here at my blog, where I have already made a number of posts that are related to Wikipedia, my activities at Wikipedia and Wikipedia issues and discussions.

It's a lot to read and not for everybody, but worthwhile for anybody who is interested in the NOFOLLOW debate in general.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Originally written April, 24th 2006

What the F**k is REL="NO FOLLOW"? - Original Proposition

Presented to WikiProject Spam on 4/17/2006.

Wikipedia is not the only Site that suffers from so called "Link Spam". Every Site and especially Blogs that offer anonymous Visitors the ability to interact, comment or contribute and often even encourage it have a common problem. People that use the features to their own personal advantage without the goal to contribute for the benefit of others. From being rare cases of abuse in the past to today's frequent occurrences which became by now more than just annoyances. They became a problem.

The same type of problem with similar reasons for it's existence as email SPAM. Talk was not enough anymore. Tools and mechanisms had to be developed to reduce the negative impact of SPAM. The purpose of Link SPAM is not as apparent as email SPAM though. Email SPAM is usually send with the goal to get the recipient to open and read the email which contains a commercial offer with the hope that the reader acts and buys the offered product or service. Email SPAM has the goal to generate instant revenue and profit.

The Difference between eMail Spam and Link Spam

Link SPAM does not. The Blog Comment that is completely irrelevant for the Blog Article containing a short Message and Link to a commercial offer is not intended for the Article Author nor it's readers. If they respond to the offer "great", but that was not the original intent by the Spammer. The Link is not meant to attract "humans". It is indented to attract the invisible automated programs called "Spider" or "Bot" utilized by all major Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN (MS LIVE) and ask.com to gather Web Content which is processed and later returned to Users at the Search Engine in the Search Results (SERPS) if they are considered relevant by the Search Engine for the keyword or phrase entered by the User. The results that are considered most "relevant" are returned first. It is the goal of every search engine to RANK the Web Pages that match the users Search Query by highest Relevance to the topic the user is searching for.

How work Search Engine? What is their Goal?

Search Engines use mind boggling algorithms to calculate the "Relevance" and thus "Ranking" of every Indexed Webpage relatively to the words and phrases found on the Web Page. If two pages contain the word "science", the search engine must make the decision, which of the two pages it believes to be more important, more relevant than the other to show it as first result, if a user enters the search term "science" at the Search Engines Website. If you search for "science" at Google.com, over 4 Million!!! Web Pages are found. Google must make the decision, which of the 4+ Million Pages it should show first to the User. It tries of course to return the ones first that are most likely the ones containing the information the User is looking for. How do Search Engines determine the ranking of each page? How do they determine that Page A is shown 5th for the term "science" and Page B 4,0000,000th. Both are obviously about "science" or they would not be considered for the results at all. The actual ranking is determined by over 100 criteria by Google for example.

One of the most important criteria is the so called "Page Rank" of a Page. Page Rank was introduced by Google and made them what they are today. The Page Rank algorithm revolutionized search engines and produced fantastic accurate results. Read the original scientific paper on Page Rank "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" by the Google Founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page or Page Rank Explained by Phil Craven to learn about the mathematical background of Page Rank.

Search Engine Ranking - Google PageRank

The actual equations are very complicated, but the general concept is surprisingly simple. In simply words is the "Page Rank" of a page getting higher the more other pages and sites link to it. Every Link is Vote from one Page towards another. The Linked to page gains Page Rank while the linking page looses a bit of it's Page Rank. I believe you start to understand where I am getting at and what the intentions of the link spammer are. Right, he wants to get a "Link" or "Vote" to his Commercial Website that Search Engines like Google think that the Page is more important.

The higher the Rank of the Linking Page itself is, the stronger is the Vote. A Link from CNN.com's Homepage is certainly a stronger Vote for a Webpage than a link to it from a personal Page at Geocities.com. That is the reason why more popular sites are more targeted by Link Spammers than less popular ones. Wikipedia is obviously very popular, thus a link from Wikipedia is worth a lot more than a Link from a less popular Site. Spammers are not only targeting public sites to get inbound links they also create artificial Link Farms and purchase links from Webmasters that are willing to cash in on their sites popularity. The Search Engines became actually very smart in detecting artificial inbound link inflation making Link Farms a lot less effective and even can cause the Website that is the beneficiary of this to get penalized or even banned from the Search Engine Index.

Wikipedia is the perfect Target

Wikipedia is the perfect target for spammers to get inbound links to their site(s) without risking a penalty from the search engines, because it is almost impossible for the search engines to determine if a link at Wikipedia was added because it is really relevant for the topic or just by a Spammer to increase his Page Rank. Blogs have the same Problem and Google developed a simple to implement mechanisms for the Blogger or Webmaster to eliminate the whole benefit of having an outbound link at those sites for the sole purpose of gaining Page Rank. The only purpose why a spammer is trying to place a link in the first place. Links can still be added and used by Human Visitors that are interested and click it. Search Engine Spiders on the other hand that visit the page will simply ignore the Link, it will not count as a vote for the target website.

How is that done? Very simple. Simply add the attribute rel="nofollow" to the HTML Link Tag

<a href="http://www.website.com">Link Anchor</a> becomes 
<a href="http://www.website.com" rel="nofollow">Link Anchor</a>

Conclusion

As you can see, it is not hard to do at all. The Change to the Wikipedia Code is absolute minor. The Gain and Benefits are out of the Question. Does this solve the problem completely? No, of course not! But it will significantly reduce the issue, because a huge number of Links added just because of Page Rank will not be added anymore. The benefits of having an outgoing link from Wikipedia to a site are severely reduced, but of course not completely eliminated. There remains the benefit of human traffic clicking the link. In this case is the link better highly relevant for the article or it will be removed quickly by the Wiki users anyway (without the need of an Editor to take actions).

• Visit the official Google blog attribute information and further resources.

I hope this clarifies the subject a bit more and finds some open ears somewhere and finally one of the Wiki Developers to spend the necessary minutes (few hours at the most) to implement this feature saving thousands and thousands of hours wasted by hundreds of Editors that have probably better things to do and could use the saved time for more important contributions for Wikipedia.

--Roy-SAC 11:31, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
You can find some background information about me and my professional qualifications on my Professional Homepage to enforce the credibility of my statements made in this article. My email is available there as well, if you you have any questions or anything else you would like to discuss with me outside the User Discussion Page.

The Discussion - Introduction and Summary

Copy/Backup of comments posted at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Spam.

How to save hundreds or thousands of hours by spending just a few

Roy: I took the time to summarize and explain an important aspect of link spam on my user discussion page below. Some Editors expressed the opinion in the past that the proposed solution will not help to significantly reduce the problem which I vehement reject. Even if the impact is not as much as I expect will it still have enough impact to justify the necessary work to implement the solution. Being an enterprise solution developer myself gives me the authority to make the statement that the implementation of the solution can only be a matter of hours. An amount of time that will be saved multiple times over with absolute certainty in the future when it comes to link spam removal.

This will not immediately, because the word about the change has to go around and get to the potential link spammers first. Unless it will be picked up by the media and other means (bloggers etc.), a gradual impact should be expected. I invite everybody interested in this to join the discussion. Wikipedia Developers and Admins are more than welcome to join as well.
--Roy-SAC 11:55, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Rhobite - Reasonable and respected Wikipedia Admin

Rhobite: You're acting like nofollow is a perfect solution to spam, but it isn't. Wikipedia has already had a large discussion about using nofollow. Mediawiki already has the technical ability to insert into links, but the community decided against it. See Wikipedia:Nofollow. Rhobite 15:01, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Roy: Hi Rhobite. Thanks for the Move to the Discussion Section. It is not a perfect solution, but a working solution for one (major) part of the problem at hand.

I will go over the comments at Wikipedia:Nofollow in detail. It's been over a year now since the vote. The nofollow attribute was quite new back then and the traffic to wikipedia has also more than quadrupled since last year. I assume the issue is today also several times bigger than it was back then.

The Solution works for other Systems and Sites such as Blogs very well and reduced the issue a lot. Spammers are now creating the blogs themselves via programs (using API's) though :(. A different problem which requires a different solution.

The nofollow attribute is not diminishing the true purpose of an honest placed link. It works for a visitor who is clicking on it (and hopefully finds some more useful content) the same as a link without the attribute. This little attribute restores the original idea of hyper linking, when Links where only placed on Sites for Visitors to follow, not computer programs.

Google is the no.1 search engine worldwide with 50-60% Market Share despite the attempts of Yahoo!, MSN and ask.com to compete with Google in the Search Engine game. Yahoo threw the towel this January. ask.com was gaining, but only a bit, MSN is working on the problem to get their new search up and running. The situation did not get better, it got worse. the rel="no follow" attribute should be added automatically by the Wikipedia engine to ANY external link (URL's starting with "http://"), regardless if it is an Article, Discussion Page, User Page or System Page.

There should be NO on/off switch. This should be announced loud and clear to the public, also explaining what it does and what it NOT does. I bed with you $100 that with will reduce the amount of link spam you get here at wikipedia at least by a double digit number.

Since the current policy pretty much considers most external links as SPAM (-> see recommendation to link to the Yahoo Dir or Dmoz only and that's it)) is the total number of external links placed across Wikipedia a realistic measurement to evaluate the effects of adding the rel="no follow" attribute to all external links.
Since this is a topic I do know quite a lot about, I thought that it is a thing I am able to contribute well. Since I shoot myself into the foot with proposing and pushing for something like this, any doubt of an hidden agenda on my part can pretty much ruled out. I do believe in the need of valuable external links that enrich the content of an article at Wikipedia or provide proof for statements made in one.
I don't see any reason why the attribute should NOT be added except the reason that you want Wikipedia to be part of the Ranking Game. I can imagine that some Wikipedians do not like the idea, especially the ones that have a personal interest in some of the external links to their own personal/business websites. --Roy-SAC 15:51, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Rhobite: My objection remains the same as a year ago: It doesn't deter spammers. Pagerank isn't the sole reason people spam Wikipedia. This is a very visible site, and if I were a spammer I would want to be linked from here, even if it didn't improve my Pagerank. A link from a prominent Wikipedia article could generate a lot of revenue for an unscrupulous person. Furthermore, Wikipedia can and should improve the Pagerank of good, relevant links. punishes operators of useful sites for the actions of spammers. Rhobite 16:57, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Roy: It will certainly not deter all of them, probably not even the majority of them, but it will for sure deter some of them. if something is becoming less lucrative, less people will be tempted by it. That is an undeniable fact.

You are probably qualified to provide some rough numbers here. Let me ask you this? How much spam is removed by members of the SPAM project across all pages of Wikipedia every month? Lets be very pessimistic and assume that only 1% of the spammers are detered by the fact that they only have gain from a link via visitors that read the article and actually click on that link but don't gain anything else in the long run by increasing their rank in the Google SERPS and getting (a lot) more visitors from there?

How much time would 1% less spam save? Put that number next to the time it takes to implement the nofollow attribute (which is already in the code as you mentioned). And also how much LESS links that should be in the article get removed because of suspicion that the intent might be more selfish by the person that added it than it actually was?

You say that it will not deter any spammer at all which means that the amount of spam will remain the same if the nofollow attribute was added. This statement is based on what? Intuition? Facts? Show them to me. I can PROVE to you that the reduction and even better, the complete elimination of page rank of a link will deter people from adding knowingly links for selfish reasons.

If you get the chance, talk to a DMOZ Editor of an important commercial category. He will tell you, that he still gets more submissions than he can handle, but he will also tell you, that it is much less since Google de-valued links to sites that are listed at Dmoz in their Ranking Algorithm. The "punishment" of useful sites will be less of an issue than you think. Regular Sites that can not be changed by every john and joe out there will still link to those sites.

People who discover the site because of the Link from Wikipedia will also pickup the URL and link to it (I have done that myself more than one). If a sites reaches a certain popularity, Pagerank becomes less of a factor for the ranking. An increase from a Page Rank of 6 to a rank of 7 for example is huge, it gets even harder to impossible to get to a rank of 9 (There are mayby 1 or 2 dozen sites in the world that have that).

Lets summarize. It will certainly reduce spam if implemented consequently across the site and made public, it is easy to do implement, because the Wikipedia code is already ready for it and last but not least, the affect on valuable (authority or popular) sites is minimal. If you disagree, explain why. --71.195.125.110 20:49, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
...

Stevietheman - Active Wikipedian

Well, I spent the time reading the complete Nofollow page from the intro to the votes and finally the comments. There was a lot of clutter (on both sides of the argument). I "stripped" out the comments that clearly showed that the writer had no clue about the meaning/purpose of the non-W3C-standard rel=nofollow attribute, or about spamming (link spamming and spamming in general) and especially not about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), in particular Google.

The remaining "on the topic" facts and arguments for both opinions were overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the attribute enabled. I was surprised to find out that "only" 41% voted to keep the new implemented feature in Wikipedia (which was obviously "enabled" by default after the update that contained it was installed) and 61% voted for its removal (deactivation).

I have to speculate to explain this result. I guess a lot of the votes must have been based on "feelings" rather than facts or other motives must have been a factor. But hey, I am irritated by the fact that you Rhobite, somebody who is affected by the spam every single day, as one of Wikipedias first line of defense against link spam is against the use of the attribute.

Anything that makes your live easier without violating any of your basic beliefs and opinions should be welcomed and even embraced by you. Is the spam problem not that bad? You should know the best. Please tell me.

Btw, I think you did a great job fixing the grammar of my additions to the Affiliate marketing article about a month ago. You have great language skills and you should use those skills more often on article content than on wasting it on banal Link Spam removals.

I am working on improving my writing skills though (it is my second language after all). Thanks. --roy<sac> ^Talk! .oOo. 09:23, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Stevietheman In a democracy, or rather, a wikicracy, no one person can decide which votes to accept and which to set aside. We all apply our own value judgments when voting. The bottom line is that the wikicracy said we're not doing nofollow, and that's that. — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Work} 22:39, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Roy You are absolutely right about the democracy. The voting/election process in a democracy is essentially very simple. Everybody that is part of the society has one vote. All votes are counted equal. The value of a vote can not be reduced or increased based on qualitative criteria. Emotions and feelings influence our decisions (votes) although most people try to be as objective as possible when it comes to that.

I just noticed for that particular vote, that emotions and feelings must have played a major role, because the objective information that were available at the same time and should have played a major role during the decision making process are conflicting the actual votes.

"wikicracy said" ... "and that's that" sounds very absolute to me. Things that involve larger groups of human beings have the tendency to change over time. Those changes make it necessary for everybody to frequently check and adjust our opinions on things. Those changes can verify existing opinions, but can also make it necessary to question an opinion as a whole and change completely. Ignoring the changes and the refusal to check if the current opinion is still as valid as before lead to no good in the past.

The World History is full of cases where absolutism, ignorance and stagnatism caused a lot of pain and suffering, to eventually end very sudden and very violent.--roy<sac> ^Talk! .oOo. 04:22, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

Stevietheman Even as somebody who detests link spam, I have always objected to using "rel=nofollow". The central reason is that by using it, Wikipedia is basically saying "We wish to not contribute any information to search engines that may aid in people finding the material they are seeking." In short, this would be an anti-search, anti-Internet move in my opinion. The value of search comes from how web documents relate to each other. Extricating the tremendously important resource that is the Wikipedia from this overall process would in turn remove a lot of value from Internet search. And I will jump up and down and up and down again if that helps in preventing the Wikipedia from ever making such a foolhardy decision to implement nofollow.

Now, add to the above the other common reasons for being against it, including "doing this won't really deter spam", which I also agree with. — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Work} 22:36, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Summarizing Statement and Conclusion

Roy I disagree on the statements that the rel=nofollow are anti-search and anti-Internet. I agree that it will have some impact on search, to be precise, search results at Google.com. It will be a positive and negative impact with the negative one further declining over time to something negligible.

The positive impact is, that the junk that is currently in Wikipedia will loose ranking and be replaced by hopefully more relevant content in the Google SERP's (I am referring to ANY part/page of the Wikipedia site that is accessible by the public, not just articles).

The negative impact is, that good content that is being linked to will drop (may be) as well, but I strongly believe that when it comes to highly relevant and good external sources linked to from active and live article pages will be marginal.
"Real" high quality content sites and pages have very often a pretty high and honest (intended) PageRank. The loss of the vote by the one link from Wikipedia will have little or no impact.

Furthermore, PageRank is very specific to Google. Ranking based on "Back Links" evaluation are a very small factor for the Yahoo! Search Engine and virtually none for MSN. Google is the only SE where it really matters, but Google has a 50-60% market share.

The rel=nofollow attribute was introduced by Google itself for sites that meet certain criteria. Wikipedia is certainly fitting the description of sites where Google recommends the use of the attribute. This contradicts the statement that the use of the rel=nofollow attribute is being anti-search.

Anti-Internet is also not being the case, on the contrary, it is as Pro-Internet as it can possibly get. Links to other Websites were never intended for programs and scripts. They were meant for human visitors from the beginning. The rel=nofollow attribute will not change this but remind people of the true purpose of linking between websites. Back to the Roots.

This Article from Gary McHugh called "Stinking Linking Thinking" from a month ago hits the Nail on the Head. It explains very well the original intentions for the use of the HREF HTML Tag. A friendly reminder for everybody who has all but forgotten this after all those years of mutilation , rape and abuse of those beautifully simple and user friendly tools.

Last but not least, I still would like to know some facts and details that made you come to the following opinion: "doing this won't really deter spam". So far does it look only like a believe or feeling to me without any objective grounds to stand on. I hope you can help me with that one. --roy<sac> ^Talk! .oOo. 05:39, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

Roy Here is an interesting post about the "nofollow" attribute by Matt Cutts (Who is a Senior Engineer at Google). He bloged about it here. Arguments coming from such a highly knowledgable and respected authority might convince some of you more than I was able to. --roy<sac> ^Talk! .oOo. 13:07, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject:Spam Opinions and Facts wanted (Invitation)

After writing longer and longer invitations to join the discussion and provide input and idata on some Wikipedians Talk pages did I end up with this rather long one which I intend to continue to post on other Users Talk Pages from whom I believe to be able to contribute to the collection of facts and past experiences. I encourage anybody who wants to help and knows a Wikipedian who might be able to provide valuable input for this cause, to grab this paragraph and post it and the Wikipediants Talk Page or simply link to it. Here is the Link Code

[[User_talk:Cumbrowski#WikiProject:Spam_Opinions_and_Facts_wanted_(Invitation)|<u>'''WikiProject:Spam''' Opinions and Facts wanted (Invitation)</u>]]

The Link will look like this: WikiProject:Spam Opinions and Facts wanted (Invitation)

Hello my fellow Wikipedian!
I know the following text is long (no kiddin'), but I thought I'd rather present the details upfront than having you guessing them. There is no "Due Date" which means, that there is no need to rush and the need of dropping the things you are currently doing :). I'd rather have you take your time with it when you have it and are also in the mood for it, than rushing over it without giving it much thought and dumping it on the done pile.

Introduction and Summary

I am looking for Wikipedians that are interested in and knowledgeable about the Issue of Link Spam at Wikipedia to express their opinion about some of my recommendations to reduce it based on my research and experiences with it due to my professional background. I believe, that you one of them, that fits the "profile" perfectly :).

My Opinion and my Request to you

It seems to be an "old" and "done" subject, Even a vote about 15 months ago was conducted about it. All what I found out and collected about it makes it seem like an open issue rather than a thing that was settled for good. Too few facts were presented and not much (if any) quantifiable/measurable information were provided.
I would like you do go over the stuff I collected and consolidated so far and provide your point of view regarding this. If you have already done so in the past, simply reference to it that I can check it out.

I am also looking for some statistical information to be able to assess the real extent of the problem (and not just the felt one) as well as it's development over an extended period of time. If you have already anything like this or know how to get it, let me know. If you don't, but can point me into directions and/or people that can, let me know as well.

Tech-Stuff

It's really appreciated. You can get technical with me, I have the necessary background for it. You can check that on my User Page. I come the Microsoft/IIS/SQL Server/VB/.NET Environment, but I have some general understanding of the technology and ideas behind it which are mostly platform independent. I do know basic PHP and also installed recently the latest MediaWiki Version 1.5.8 and MySQL Server for Windows Version 5.0.19 on a Windows 2003 Server with IIS6 and PHP5 Extension. I can use this installation for some Tests or Script Development which den might be used at the Live Wikipedia. Probably Scripts for Data Collection and Assessment only. I do not intend to develop anything to make changes to processes and features of Wikipedia.org. If it happens that something that could be used in the future comes out of it, fine. I do not intend to write anything for myself, whatever comes out of it will be Public Domain (Open Source without any restriction for it's use at all).

My Intensions and Goals

I wrote similar Invitations on Talk Pages of other Wikipedia I came across, but this one is the most detailed version of it in regards to explaining my intentions and purpose of the whole thing in great length and depth. I would appreciate, if you would invite other interested Wikipedians that are authorities in this area to give their input as well. I would like to keep the ones, that only know little details and have only general/common knowledge about this kind of stuff out of the discussion for now to prevent it from getting dispersed right at the beginning and turned into a rhetoric discussion. Nothing will come out of it, if only one "belief" group argues against another, based on speculations and feeling rather than facts and solid numbers. An open for all discussion will have to happen at some point in time, but it should be later, when enough data and information are available to have some solid ground for a general discussion for everybody that gets at least a chance to end in actions that will benefit everybody at Wikipedia and its many users in the long run.

Sincerely --roy<sac> ^Talk! .oOo. 05:41, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Why Worry Today, If Your Bank Account Gets Hacked Tomorrow

My post from a week ago, about the major flaws in the new online banking security systems that banks around the country deployed recently, did not get any attention. The flaw was explained in detail and demonstrated (by actually hacking a bank account) at the Defcon 15 hacker conference in Las Vegas. One person dugg it at Digg.com and that was it. End of story, nobody seems to be interested. Well, it only affects pretty much everybody, at least everybody who uses online banking.

Meanwhile did also other blogs that are specialized in application and system security write about the story. DarkReading.com was one of the most known publications who published the story "New Bank Practices Make Hacking Easier" a couple days after I published mine.

Their story died at Digg.com, just as mine, but at least did some more bloggers pick up their story. Here are a few other bloggers who picked it up:

• M. M. Madan: Bank's "Two Factor" Schemes Are Fundamentally Flawed


• AuthenticationWorld.Com: Why more authentication may be harmful to banks


• FIRST.org: New Bank Practices Make Hacking Easier


• Dr. Neal Krawetz/Hackerfactor.com: Black Hat and Defcon Post-Conference (as part of a general DefCon 15 summary

Here is a picture of Brendan O'Connor, who presented the issue at the conference, which makes it easy to understand, why some people might not give him the attention he deserves.

It is funny how things work sometimes. On the one hand are people going berserk and crazy about some "big privacy issues" that are bullshit. I just mention Google and the other search engines regarding their updates to their privacy policies.

I guess it has to hurt a bunch of people first, some accounts hacked and life's and businesses ruined that people wake up and ask "WTF is going on here?". The cries will be loud and painful to listen to. People will ask "Did nobody knew about this?" .. Of course did somebody knew about this, but you were not listen, you dumba...!

"Schadenfreude" is not a good thing in this matter, but a bit cynicism does not hurt either.

Quick Update: Here is the 47 pages presentation by Brendan O'Connor from DefCon 15 in PDF format (only 230KB in size), titled "Greater Than One - Defeating 'strong' authentication in web applications". dc-15-oconnor.pdf

The presentation document goes into much more details than I was in my previous blog post. It also illustrates the issues nicely. Check it out.

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

New Online Banking Security Process Opens More Security Holes Than it Closes

I just got back from DefCon 15 at the Rivera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. I will post about the other events at another time, because what I saw this late afternoon at the conference is more important. It is ironic that this session was one of the last one, when many guys already left the conference and were on their way home.

I saw at the conference, where a guy who is (maybe) legal drinking age showed a room full of hundreds of people (it became surprisingly crowded while his presentation progressed) “how cool” the new security add-ons to the online banking login and authentication process are. Additions that are enforced by governmental regulations with the intention to make online banking more secure.

The session was going well beyond the "time limit" for it (1 1/2 hours instead of 50 minutes) and the organizers shut it down eventually and the whole thing moved into a overcrowded Q&A room where the discussion and presentation was continued by the speaker for another 45 minutes, which was pretty cool of him, but you could tell, that he wanted to get this info out there.

Yes, the session was about online banking, the new and "more secure" online banking.

You might noticed that pretty much every bank changed their authentication forms and procedures over the last few months. Those changes, caused by the new government regulations are basically aiding hackers to break into your online account.

• Did you notice steps like picking "your" personal image (from a number of choices provided by the bank), that the bank will show you in the future as a proof to you, that it is really us, your bank, and not a hacker doing a phishing attempt to get to your personal information"?


• Did you see the security questions that are derived from your public records, very similar as if you try to access your credit report? Questions like, "Which of the following X things are true?" and then showing you things like previously owned car makes or home loan amounts, where one of them is matching yours?

Yes, those are the new security measurements that were ADDED to the existing online banking software, actually boiler plated in front of the existing software, almost in all cases provided by a different 3rd party vendor, because it was cheaper to add that kind of "patch" to the process to meet government regulations than it would have been to add it to the existing banking software itself, fully integrated.

What struck me the most is how bad it actually is. The new "enhancements" did not enhance the security of the old processes at all. They have the same flaws, but worse, they increased the attack surface for a malicious hacker and made it in fact easier for him to get the information he wants and even more as a bonus.

If I spent a few days with it, I would probably able to hack my bank myself. Its that bad and I am not a hacker (I am a geek and know a lot of stuff, but that does not make me a hacker and/or security expert for something like Online Banking).

I am sure that over the coming weeks and months stuff will surface in the news. People complaining or incidents about hacked accounts. Too much people saw this, not the detailed instructions how to break into the online banking software via a step by step guide, but he showed the way the updated systems work, or better, not work.

He would have broken the law and go to jail, if he would have hacked somebody else's bank account in front of hundreds of witnesses. He hacked his own bank account instead and provided proof that he is not doing anything extremely hard or attacked the system in a way to alter its behaviour.

By the way, the guys name is "Brendan O'Connor" and he works for an unnamed US finance company. He is not an unknown. He did break at last years DefCon the news about a security hole in Xerox printers, which caused quite some stir.

This time is the issue a much bigger and affecting much more people.
I will throw in some keywords and phrases that point to the problems. If you know a bit about computers, the internet and web development, you will get a pretty good idea what I am talking about.

• New Security is ADD-ON on top of existing authentication layer


• Finger Printing based on HTTP header content via client side Javascript (tip: "View Source", don't waste the time and write something yourself. Make it easier for you. If your bank uses Flash instead, download the flash and decompile it)


• Security question will reappear if remained unanswered. Answers will change every time the question is asked (randomly). No limit how often the same question is being asked (until answered)


• Personal image system. Same system used by majority of banks. Don't waste time on the images. Look at the alt tags. If you have an account, (don't) look at the nice image gallery where you can pick YOUR picture from. Look at the page where the image is shown to you. Ignore the image file name, that changes all the time and is not predictable, but look at the.. you know what to look at.


• Be grateful for non-obscure error messages, sometimes is the time the system spends on thinking about how to tell you that you entered the wrong stuff the actual message.


• If you write your own pages, don't forget to use the code you already got. Put a reference to the source in it and don't take the credits for yourself. Somebody spent a lot of time to write that code (for you) :)

Okay, that is enough. I hope you get the picture. I forgot to write the email of Brendan down. It was name.name@gmail.com. The "O'" part of his last name makes me unsure, if it was brendan.oconnor AT gmail DOT com or something different. You can find out through the DefCon.org organizers. Brendan said that he provides the code and everything to anybody who wants to see it.

One thing is for sure. That story does not make me sleep better at night, especially if you consider the fact that you are with almost 100% certainty not covered, if your account gets hacked and have to cover the losses yourself, opposite to the archaic method of using checks, where losses are covered by the bank, even if you lost your check book due to grave negligence. This is messed up!

Quick Update: Here is the 47 pages presentation by Brendan O'Connor from DefCon 15 in PDF format
(only 230KB in size), titled "Greater Than One - Defeating 'strong' authentication in web applications".
dc-15-oconnor.pdf

And also see the video recording of the DefCon Session with Brendan O'Connor:



Backup link to the video T164 - Greater Than 1 - Defeating "Strong" Authentication in Web Applications at Google Video if you have problems with playing the embedded video.

Good Article Nomination and the Day of Independence

It is Wednesday the 4th of July 2007. Today is a holiday, Independence Day. I have some work to do, but I also did something that is dear to my heard.

It is today almost exactly one month after I posted about the struggle with the featured article nominations for the article to search engine optimization at Wikipedia and the article did appear on the Wikipedia homepage for everybody to see.



That was two days ago on Monday, July 2, 2007. Jonathan Hochman aka “Jehochman“ at Wikipedia did a good job there and also spent a lot of time on the article to get it up to the level of featured.

That an article to a subject like search engine optimization gets featured at Wikipedia was very encouraging. You must consider that a number of Wikipedians think less than favorable about anything related to monetization and internet marketing.

I spent a lot time myself on the article to affiliate marketing, which I nominated end of last week for the status of a "good article" (I step before "featured article"). The nomination process is currently on hold to do some tweaking and tuning of the article. Especially help with the grammar is needed and a bit rephrasing work for a few things here and there.

Graeme Bartlett is the editor who is doing the review of the article. He gave me some useful tips, including where to find some practical help. One is a new project within the Wikipedia project "Business and Economics", which is called "Collaboration of the Month" (Beta). I made my plea for help with the affiliate marketing article there and hope that it will be considered.

The article came a long way. You can see here the so called diff (difference) between the versions of the article from February 26, 2006, the day when I did the first edit in the article, and the current one. The article failed its first “good article” nomination in March, which was a little bit premature. You can see here the difference between the versions of the article from March 8, 2007, the day when it was nominated for the first time and today’s version.

The number of active editors dropped over time and I am now the only one left who seems to care. I hope that I can get at least some people to go over the article for plain and simple spell and grammar checking. If you read this and are willing to help out, head over to Wikipedia and read the article. If you find any errors, go ahead and edit the article to fix the error immediately. I would appreciate it.

Let’s see how it goes. In the meantime, I would like to wish everybody who is living here in the United States a happy 4th of July and hope that you have or had a good time with your loved ones.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC


Update July 11, 2007
More information about the "Good Article" status at Wikipedia. To put things into perspective.

• Currently, 1,480 of a total of 1,871,105 Wikipedia articles (about 1 in 1,260) are featured articles


• Currently, 2,511 (about 1 in 745) articles meet the good article criteria

The article to affiliate marketing failed again the nomination for good article. Everything was taken care of, except for some issues with the writing style and Grammar. No editor who is good with the English language reacted to my requests for help. It's sad.

deviantART and Web 2.0

It was a post that was several months in the making. I was having it on my to-do list for months, but was finally able to finish and publish it.

I am not talking about a post here, but at my Blog at ReveNews.com, which is related to internet and affiliate marketing. The blog post I did is titled "User Generated Advertising Web 2.0 Style" and is about leveraging communities like deviantART.com for your business.

deviantART is a great place for businesses who want to do "different" advertising, 100% Web 2.0 style. I suggested the use of dA design contests to have artists create designs for any kind of thing you can come up with. I explained the benefits like this:

You engage people, inspire creativity and get authentic designs, which are honest and pure. It could be a web 2.0 style advertising campaign, very viral (speaking of buzz marketing).

It's a pretty long post, but I recommend to read it, if you are interested in this sort of things.



I did a contest at deviantART myself last year. It was not a design contest, but it was a contest to promote my Text art site RoySAC.com a little bit. I blogged about it too. I hope this provides some inspiration. Just think outside the box from time to time and try out new things. This is true no matter what you are doing.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

At Last - Some Success at Wikipedia

I am a Wikipedian since December 2005. I wrote about how that happened back in April.

I did over 2000 edits in Wikipedia since then, mostly articles and other things that are either related to internet marketing or to the Demoscene and Text art. I did a lot of work on the articles to affiliate marketing and the article to ASCII art.

I try for a long time to get other affiliate marketers to contribute to Wikipedia to that subject, but my attempts are not bearing any fruits so far. In addition, my major rant last month was not as successful as I had hoped. I hope that it will change eventually.

But there are also good news.

The article to search engine optimization was promoted to “featured article” at Wikipedia. I did contribute some stuff to the article and was always watching it for spammers and vandals. I was also active in discussions on the articles talk page.

What does featured article mean? Here is what Wikipedia itself says, quote:

Featured articles in Wikipedia

Featured articles are considered to be the best articles in Wikipedia, as determined by Wikipedia's editors. Before being listed here, articles are reviewed at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates for accuracy, neutrality, completeness, and style according to our featured article criteria.

At present, there are 1,420 featured articles, of a total of 1,815,298 articles on Wikipedia. Thus, about one in 1,270 articles is listed here. Articles that no longer meet the criteria can be proposed for improvement or removal at Wikipedia:Featured article review.

A small bronze star () on the top right corner of an article's page indicates that the article is featured.

Nice, eh?

It was not easy and it was a lot of work, mostly by the editor Jehochman, who is a SEO with the real name Jonathan Hochman.

You can see that by looking at the discussion page for the nomination. One of the biggest issue was the fact that many sources are blogs. Wikipedia is still working on improving on the bias a lot of editors have regarding the quality of blogs. Some missed the fact that blogs became popular with online publications and also classic offline ones who have a website and publish their content online. That did not prevent the debate whether or not the references used to verify the facts are reliable or not.

I made a call to several known SEOs to comment on the resources. A few actually did, which was nice, while others, like Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz posted an article at his blog instead.

It was titled “Search Engine Optimization Article at Wikipedia Doesn't Deserve Attention” and I know that Rand did choose the title more to draw attention to it than actually meaning it.

He is not supporting Wikipedia and the efforts made by other marketers, like Jonathan and me. He did also make some valid points. I believe however, that there are a lot of misconceptions and bias from the side of the SEO community towards Wikipedia, something the SEO community blamed the Wikipedia community for. That is actually very ironic. Yes, it is true, there is bias, but at least try the Wikipedians to cope with it and find a solution for the problem. I left a ton of comments at the blog and hope that I got something across. For example:

"The truth becomes whatever the popular opinion is."

Isn't that what the "truth" is anyway? Truth is to 99% opinion. Even if all items available to you are proven, documented and unskewed facts, does it not make it true, because you don't know if all items that are available to you are all items there are.

The leaving out of a fact can change the "truth" in an instant. No lie or biased comment necessary.

and as response to a comment to my comment did I write:

That's why are the core rules "Neutral Point of View" and "no original resource" so important. An encyclopedia is about facts, not interpretation. Neutral point of view means that facts that could be interpreted as negative have to be included as much as the facts that could be interpreted as positive.

The interpretation of all the facts and make it out to be something good or something bad is not the purpose of an encyclopedia. If you take the same set of facts today and look at them again in the future, the interpretation might changes from good to bad or the other way around due to changes in society and people's values.

That's the idea, but that is harder to do in reality than it sounds when you say it. People are people and the only thing we can do is trying. If the try was good or bad is a question of interpretation again. Ironic, isn't it? :)

I made a lot more comments, but you get the picture. It is not as easy as it seems and all we can do is try our best to make it as good as possible.

Barry Schwartz was also reporting about it at SearchEngineLand.com. I could not help it, but be a bit sarcastic in my comment.

Well, it’s done, the article is now a featured article and I think that it will help the SEO community indirectly. If you plan to do work at Wikipedia, check out my collection of relevant Wikipedia resources for newbie’s. I am sure that you will appreciate them.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Travel back in Time for a Vision of the Future

I traveled a couple days a go back in time to the year 1994 to an internet marketing and advertising conference. Wait a moment. Did I say 1994? Yes I did and I am not trying to trick you.

See here the video recording of one of the first, if not the first internet marketing and advertising conference, which was held on November 4th,1994 in San Francisco, California.

What happened?
Ken McCarthy is the first speaker and talks about opportunities. He was very forward thinking and you might think that what he says is obvious and logical. They were not in 1994. The second speaker is Marc Andreessen, co-Founder of Netscape, which was founded just a bit earlier in 1994 as well after the overwhelming success and popularity of their software called "web browser", the original "Mosaic" and the creation of the World Wide Web as we know it today.

The Web is just existed for a year or so when the conference was held.



link to video

It was a nice trip back in time. It also brought some memories back and a chuckle when I heard Ken talk about the role of BBS systems in the growth of the internet.

I have to say that he was a bit off when it comes to the role of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) would play in getting people online by becoming something like a mini-ISP. True, a lot of BBS software development companies were jumping on the bandwagon and worked on internet integration into their software. With about 50,000+ bulletin boards in the united states at that time did it may be quite reasonable. I happened to be a Sysop of a bulletin board exactly around that time and can tell you that this could not have worked that way.

What are we talking about here?
The vast majority of the BBS's where run by individuals as a hobby and not as a business. Access was often free, but donations for hardware upgrades were appreciated. The resources were limited and multi-line (more than one modem) BBS's became only widely available at the beginning of the nineties when the computer hardware was able to connect multiple nodes to a single computer. But even then remained the number of BBS systems with more than 5 or even more than 10 nodes relatively low.

A BBS that was an ISP (kind of)
If you want to get an Idea how a BBS looked like with over 20-30 nodes, look at the picture below. That is "one corner" of the Rusty-n-Edie's BBS around 1988-89 and far away from its final size. The BBS had a staggering 128 dial in connections available in its prime and needed one computer for each line, plus multiple support servers. Details are from the article "The Birth of Rusty n Edie's BBS" that was written by the sysop of Rusty n Edie's, Rusty Hardenburgh.

If the majority of BBS's would have been like that, the Idea of them becoming a micro-ISP would have been a bit more realistic.


(Equipment detail follow at the end of the post)

The Reality
Normal BBS's were limited in bandwidth and dial in connections. My BBS had 5 lines, which means that it could handle 5 callers at the same time. My BBS had over 100 active users and a lot of them called every day or every other day. At peak times were all 5 lines constantly busy, which means that a lot of my users got a busy signal for a period of time, before they got a connection when another user left.

A user that is finally able to connect checks a few mails online, if the BBS was file focuses as mine. Some Systems were message focused and connected in networks like the Fidonet (which could be compared to the early Usenet of the Internet). Since the volume of message could be pretty big depending on the number of subjects you were interested in and subscribed for, users did not read the emails while connected to the BBS, but connected with special software, like Email clients today and downloaded new messages and uploaded responses.

If the BBS was created to be a place to swap files, the user would check the mostly new uploaded files only, flag the ones he is interested in and start a download and possibly an upload at the same time. When finished, users would hang up and leave to consume the downloaded content "offline", making the node available to another user.

Because of that was it possible for small BBS's with only a handful nodes to serve so much people. The "online time" was fairly brief.

..and the conclusion
Connecting the user with the world wide web would have changed that and make users stay longer connected because they can't browse the net "offline". During that time is the node blocked for any other user, which would reduce the number of people you could serve in a reasonable manner.

Add to this, that the BBS would also require a permanent connection to the internet which was not cheap back then. There was no such thing as high speed internet yet. What some Sysops did, was the option for users to create an internet email account and use the BBS as something like a Hotmail or Gmail.

The end of the BBS era was coming, but some did not wanted to believe it. BBS software companies attempted to create internet versions of their BBS software, but failed to realize that the internet does not work like a BBS. Needless to say, with the BBS's did also die a lot of BBS software companies, including Clark Development who created "PcBoard", the BBS software I was using (Rusty n Edie's too btw).

That's life. There is nothing anybody could have done to change the course of history.

Here are the promised technical details about the Rusty-n-Edie's BBS.

• Three 486 33Mhz servers with 32 Megabytes of memory on each. One 22Mhz 486 server with 80 Megabytes of RAM. They each have a caching controller. We need that much memory to cache the fifteen 780 Megabytes SCSI drives, three 1.2 Gigabytes and two 386 Megabytes ESDI drives, the 20 drives format to something over 15 Gigabytes.


• 128 (one for each node) 16Mhz 286's.
• In addition, we have eight 33Mhz 386's, a 16Mhz 386 (our original server, our original Tandy XT type machine died about a year ago), and five 12Mhz 286's (These machines are so we can work on the system without taking it down).
• 25 Anchor: 2400 baud modems.
• 58 US Robotic's Dual Standards 14.4 V32 V32bis V42bis.
• 24 Compucom 9600 baud Speedmodems.
• 5 Hayes V-Series V42bis modem.
• 16 direct connect CONNECT-USA lines.
• All of this networked together with four copies of the wonderful Novell Netware 386. It works great!
• The whole thing is hooked up to ten huge batteries that supply 16KV of uninterruptable power.
• Sysops: the couple Rusty Hardenburgh and Edwina Hardenburgh, two of their son's, their daughter and a friend of the family with the name Carl

The BBS was busted by and shut down by the FBI in 1993 because of software piracy.
More to that is available at Wikipedia.