Blogged thoughts, is our web blog. Expect views, opinion, rants and tirades about everything and anything 

Folks I recently deleted two threads from my forums, these threads were about a year old and thus were spidered and indexed by the ‘big three’. If I had have spotted these threads at the time they were posted I would have deleted them straight away as they were simply threads going on about how great a certain company is, I believe SPAM is the word you kids are using these days, yes SPAM plain and simple.

Anyhow the threads got through the forum moderation team (me) for whatever reason I don’t know, perhaps it was a busy week so I didn’t even know these threads existed. That was until about two months ago when I started getting emails asking me to remove them because they were ‘inaccurate’.. whatever that means. When I didn’t ‘jump’ when they asked me to ‘jump’ they started asking me for my solictors number so legal action could begin.

Can you believe that? They spam my site and then about a year later when one of the threads appears in Google and I refuse to remove it (at least for the time being) because I don’t like being told what to do be spammers (as it kind of means they ‘win) they threaten legal action. I asked them what possible grounds would they have for legal action against me and my site, there was no response. That was the end of the email ‘correspondence’ (or threats), however this week the voicemails and phonecalls from Manhattan in New York started coming in, about three or four in total, asking me in a not so pleasent tone to ‘cease and desist’ and remove the threads as they were ‘inaccurate’.

I toyed with the idea for a couple of days, not actually knowing if this went further (and I continued to refuse to remove the threads) could it put the future of the site at risk. I came to the decision to just remove the threads and forget about them just in case any ill effects could come my direction by way of any legal action this company may opt to take.

I have to admit that I didn’t feel good about it afterwards, I felt I was right (morally at least) to refuse to remove these spam threads (which by this stage were ’buried’ and not detracting from the quality of topics) from my forums so removing them certainly felt like handing a victory to the spammers. What do you guys think? What would you have done? Was I indeed breaking some ‘law’ which could have resulted in legal action being taken against me? Have I let the ’side’ down? Should I have made it more frustrating for them?

Short post today folks, by the way is it ‘webtraffic’ or ‘web traffic’? Seems like a lot of web specific words/phrases get joined together. Anyhow today is the 1st of November and for the 5th month in a row my traffic went up from the figure from the previous month. The line chart for daily visitors when in year view on Google Analytics shows a small but seemingly steady movement towards a Northeast direction, the particular figure for October passed what could be called a ‘milestone’ (for the relaunched site anyhow, it didn’t pass some of the crazy milestones of 2002 and 2003) thus I must be doing something right. The question is though how do I maintain this and keep these increases going indefinitely? What would you do?

Is it a no brainer to just continue to concentrate on writing quality content for the site and then a ‘write it and they will come’ type of situation will occur? Is it the case that I should increase my networking in related external blogs, forums and newsgroups? Or should I attempt to juice up my SERPS with another active links campaign, reciprocal or otherwise? Perhaps I should set aside a budget for pay per inclusion directories?

More than likely my strategy will be a combination of a couple of different approaches, including some (or all) of the above. The one thing I am sure of though is that in terms of website promotion one cannot rely on the status quo to get them by, I mean if I was to simply leave the site the way it was and not add new content or not get more links, sooner or later traffic would start to dip and fizzle away, nobody can say that this would not be the case. Of course utimately I will be making the end decisions about this sites marketing efforts but of course your opinions are always welcome, so please do share them.

Well folks, I’m told some of my blog posts contain too much information and I should save the really good stuff for articles as blogs are meant to be quick and to the point, I definitely see the logic to this point of view so perhaps in the future I will try to keep the posts shorter and literally go down the route of just jotting down my thoughts in a somewhat less formal way than before.  

Anyhow I just recently became a subscriber of .net magazine. It’s published in the UK but is available worldwide through http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/subscribe. It covers a wide ranging set of topics about the Internet and technology in general (emphasis on the word general - these is no UK focus) such as web design & accessibility, web hosting, PHP and web development, software reviews, product reviews, SEO & Internet marketing, gaming, digital photography, Google, Yahoo and MSN etc. Although the title of the mag (.net) might fool you into thinking it’s about the extremely powerful Microsoft development framework, actually .net development doesn’t get any more coverage than any of the other topics (unless of course there’s a special feature or something like that) mentioned above and hundreds of other little ‘baby’ topics in between.

The July issue has a big focus on web accessibility and in partcular talks about ‘PAS 78′, which is a set of guidelines which attempts to clarify what in practical terms needs to be done to make a website accessible. I’m not sure if anyone has read this mag but my view of it is that it’s like a lot of my favourite ezines/newsletters combined into one and it’s great to be able to give those strained eyes a break from the computer screen and read something like this offline. Great read, I’m looking forward to the next edition already, I would however like to see somewhat more SEO/Internet marketing stuff though as reading quality content about this offline would certainly be a novelty.

Nothing major here like insider trader information or betting tips for the weeks horse racing, no not at all. In this blog post I basically just want to commend camera company Kodak for their customer service and in particular the customer service they gave me in relation to a specific problem I was having with my digital camera. The digital camera is a Kodak EasyShare V550 and it’s got some pretty nice features such as top quality motion capture. Anyhow I bought the camera in November or Decemeber I can’t remember exactly, but it wasn’t a year old when it broke so it was still covered by the warranty (for legitimate reasons only though… or so I thought) which comes with the camera when you buy it.

‘Broke’ is very generic I know so let me tell you that the specific problem I was having was with the lens, which seemed to be jammed in place and because of this forced the camera to shutdown almost immediately. Now the reason why the lens was jammed in place was because I dropped the camera, I know I’m stupid and I should expect problems if I go around dropping expensive kit like there’s no tomorrow, but it was an accident and accidents happen. To make matters worse though I of course had to ‘fiddle’ with it to try and fix it but only ended up damaging it more.

I wanted to get it fixed as soon as possible, but after being quoted €200 for it to be repaired from a camera repair shop on Grafton Street and then being told by that same shop that there was no way Kodak would fix it under the warranty as there was clearly impact/fiddle damage on the lens I was not very optimistic about the camera or my wallet.

Not wanting to spend €200 on repairs for a camera that cost about €380 in the first place and because I’m a bit of a chancer I decided to ignore the opinion of the aformentioned camera repair shop and give Kodak customer service a call to see if they would fix my camera even though it wasn’t their fault it was broke. I’m very happy I made that call. The support person was very helpful and insisted they would fix this strange faulty lens issue that came from ‘nowhere’. Two days later a UPS courier picked my camera up (complete with extra bubble wrap) from my place of work, the camera was bound for the Kodak camera repair center in Germany. Cost to me so far was about €3, for a box and bubble wrap to store the camera. Today (the package actually arrived on Thursday but I was in Portugal) barely 10 working days since I sent the camera on its way with UPS, I opened a package without having any idea of what was inside, I didn’t think it could be the camera so soon. To my delight though it was the camera equipped with a nice new and fully functioning Schneider lens.

I’m certain that when the repair people at Kodak in Germany seen the damage on the lens they knew that it was dropped or banged and that they didn’t have any obligation to fix it under warranty. Fair play to the Kodak guys though they fixed it anyway and hence they go way up in my estimation because those of you that read my first post on this new blog (located @ http://www.akamarketing.com/blog/11-myhostie-lets-here-it-for-the-little-guy.html) will know that I consider customer care/support/service to be very important when purchasing anything. Kodak will definitely be getting my cash when I decide to change camera models, I can tell you that for a fact.