Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

My CTR is twice as high as normal due to a huge influx of Britney-spears picture seekers. Apparently, I’m now #2 in the Google Image results for that query, which is causing, while not a lot of load, certainly a lot of ad clicks!

I recently received the following email soliciting a text link on my blogs. I really don’t like being asked to sell links on my blog, but this individual at least spelled my name correctly:

Hi Elliott,

I came across your site while browsing around on the web and thought I’d write. I’m a fellow Ivy-Leaguer (Columbia ‘03) and I recently helped start a writing company at www.pegr.com . I was wondering if you’d be willing to work out a trade with me, where you link to my website from a few of your blogs in exchange for payment from me. The link text would be “website copywriting, ghost writer services, organic seo, technical writing”. Is this something you’d be interested in? If so, how much do you think is fair? I’m also willing to make an offer if that’s easier for you.

Take it easy!

Sandy
www.pegr.com

Not particularily liking this business, I replied:

Hi Sandy,

I’m a random coke junky (hate pepsi) from Devry Technical Institute, all though my website lists me as a Cornellian, that’s just so people would be more impressed with me. I use a DNS hack to get the pagerank that you see, and there’s a lot of cloaking going on too. My main source of traffic comes from exotic pornography sites and church webpages on frontpage 98 that I’ve turned into massive visitor botnets.

I would be more than happy to sponsor your black hat SEO, but my e-banking isn’t working. If you’re interested, I will have to accept deliver of 1000 baby leeches, which I use in my own home-grown surgical office, per link. It should be relatively easy to ship them overnight in refrigerated containers.

How many links are you interested in?

Thanks,
Elliott C. Bäck

It’s probably immature, but then so is this kind of social engineering SEO.

I’m one of those freaks who uses a bayesian classifier to bucket my email into a variety of categories before consumption. Currently, I have filtered 26,797 emails into 17 buckets with 98.99% accuracy, counting from Mid-March of this year. A mere 16% of my email is spam, and the rest requires good filtering so that I can deal with it in a resonable period of time. So, what are the buckets I use for Bayesian filtering? Just mouseover the colored sections:

The buckets are amazon, app_dev, bank, blogging, cornell, cs490, elliottback-dot-com, family, friends, isso, lists, news, other, production_asst, spam, survey, and wordpress. So, first, what do you notice in common?

Things like {amazon, app_dev, cs490, production_asst, survey} belong to a class called “professional” while things like {elliottback-dot-com, blogging, and wordpress} should be in a class called “blogging.” {family, friends} are “personal,” while {isso, cornell} belong to a class called “education.” Banking probably stands alone, but the rest should be considered spam.

The point of this is that I’ve finally discovered that simplicity is far better than a complicated set of filterings…

I once offered to get Karen’s RSS Feeds setup for her site, but she likes it just the way it is. It’s really quite cute. Update: Looks like her site is now powered by Wordpress.com’s commercial offering, and lo, it has an RSS feed. Sweet!

What is with industry support these days? Systems should NEVER go down! Not GMAIL not TECHNORATI, nothing!

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