Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I think it’s time to stop reading dealbreaker in my google reader feeds:

Let’s see why:

• Two “continue reading” links
• No full text RSS feed
• An ugly and stupid “follow Dealbreaker” banner that I doubt anyone will ever click
• A gigantic google-style text link ad

We wish the web would allow information to transmit openly, but sites continue to push monetization over content. It’s time to switch!

I tried leaving this as a reply to Jesse Anderson’s A Few More Million Amazonian Monkeys but the blog comments are broken:

This is fundamentally pointless–there are only 27^9 (a-z and a space) combinations to run through. If you can do maybe 1M/s you can do them all in ~62 days. A better question is why, unless you hate the universe and want to spend our computational power producing entropy?

An interesting article in the NYT today called A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web describes how Vitaly Borker makes his business tick using negative feedback and reviews to game search engines:

“Hello, My name is Stanley with DecorMyEyes dot com,” the post began. “I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement.”

It’s all part of a sales strategy, he said. Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales. He closed with a sardonic expression of gratitude: “I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven.”

Ironically, the New York Times links directly to one of Vitaly Borker’s sites, giving him a big boost of authority in search engine rankings. (aside: What do I have to do to get the NYT to link me, I wonder?)