Humour, Internet

Scott Newham still drives a gay Saxo

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Today I received an email from Scott Newham regarding this post. Seems Scott’s girlfriend found the post when Googling his name. I’m not surprised when you see that my site ranks #1 in Google for Scott Newham.

The reason for all of this fun was a couple of years ago (I think, was it that long?) Scott pasted my contact details into the forum of a Saxo website and solicited everyone there to phone me up and threaten me, which they did. Very entertaining it was as well.

I guess Scott didn’t realise I’d be able to find him based on his post, and expose what he did. Here’s Scott’s email from today.

From:Scott Newham <scottnewham@hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: Response to post blog entry dated October 10th, 2007

Hi Daz,

I can understand how you can still feel bitter about the events that occurred last year however I thought that maybe everyone had buried the hatchet on those issues.

However I was alerted by my girlfriend as to a website that appeared when she typed my name into google.

You seem to have made some incriminating allegations against me which are completely untrue. Apart from posting your readily available personal information up on a public website, I never once acted upon this information and called you, let alone threaten you. I’m not sure where you’re unfounded allegations have risen from?

I would like to discuss this issue in person as I’m sure you are aware that what you are doing is defamation of character which is illegal and therefore amounts to libel.

I look forward to hearing your reply.

Thanks
Scott

Hmm, I don’t believe anything is unfounded at all, he even admits in the email that he pasted my contact details up on a public forum. He doesn’t state that he then asked others to phone me though. Luckily I do have a copy of the thread, I make a point of doing this sort of thing.

I then received this email within 10 minutes:

From: Craig Armstrong <saxo180@lycos.co.uk>
Subject: Scott Newham

I would suggest you join saxperience.co.uk to justify your comments made about Scott and his saxo. I for one can vouch that a) Scott is not a chav, b) his car has been suitably modified for track use adn c) you appear to be giving him a hard time for no reason whatsoever.

I think you need to grow up, stop being so unnecessarily abusive and at least go part wat to justifying your claims. Unless you have evidence of any of the claims made against Scott I would suggest you remove your abusive comments or risk facing legal action against you and your website.

Most Sincerely

Craig

So now I’m being threatened with legal action. As the ground they are stood on is somewhat shaky I’ll not hold my breath over that. What I have said about Scott is true, he does drive a gay Saxo. In my opinion it is gay, and my opinion cannot be challenged in court my Scally friend.

So, in summary, if you don’t want your name plastered over a website and to rank #1 in Google for a search on your name, don’t post my contact details and ask people to crank call me. It pisses me off.

If however someone would like to crank call me now, go for your guns. I have a great podcast section on this website just waiting for your call.

Internet, Make Money, Rants

eBay boss quits amid disappointing $500 million 53% profit increase!

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Meg Whitman, the boss of eBay and person who guided them from humble beginnings in 1998 to become the giant they are today is to retire as a result of their ‘poor’ performance in Q4 2007, the Guardian reports.

The company’s profits for the three months to December jumped by 53% to $531m (£271m). But its guidance on its prospects for the year fell short of analysts’ expectations, prompting concern about a slowdown in the volume of merchandise put up for sale on the site.

What sort of World do we live in where a 53% increase in profits leading to £271 million can be considered failure?

If however eBay are looking at ways to increase the number of items listed on their auction site, I have a few ideas.

Firstly, allow people to list PS2 games if you don’t have a PayPal account. You currently must have PayPal and offer it as a payment option when listing PS2 games. I presume this is the same for other video game formats.

Secondly stop charging people FOUR times when they list items on eBay and accept payment through PayPal. I’ve already ranted about this before, so if eBay is serious they should take note. Charging me a listing fee, a final sale fee, a PayPal transfer fee and a PayPal withdrawal fee when I sell a DVD for 99p is not going to tempt me to do it again.

Internet

The demise of Facebook

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Now before you start telling me how Facebook’s worth over $11 billion and how it’s more popular that MySpace and you use it every day, I know already. I use it every day as well. I use it at home, I use it sneakily in work (just kidding ;)) and I use it on my phone. I even update my Facebook status from the pub just to let people know what I’m drinking.

It’s addictive, I get it.

However, Facebook has a problem. It has a disease. The disease is the great unwashed, or MySpace users as we call them today. Facebook was originally setup for use by students of Harvard and was later expanded to include other establishments such as MIT and Boston University. Then of course it was opened to all Universities, schools and eventually the public.

This, you see, is the problem. Facebook was created by the elite, to be used by the elite. It was not created for use by, well, for want of a better word, chavs. The once great exclusive domain, from which the intellectuals of this world could look down upon their MySpace brethren, from a safe distance, has been invaded and contaminated by the very people it was designed to exclude. Facebook is becoming corrupted with junk.

Facebook

Much like MySpace before it, which is now a realm of fake profiles, awful imagery and impossible to load pages, Facebook is rapidly jamming up with the crud of the Internet. It’s becoming another MySpace. Whenever I log into my account now I’m hit with a barrage of requests from Zombies, Werewolves, Vampires, Scrabulous, Valentines, Sex Fantasies… you name it, it’s there. I have to go through all of them one by one hitting ‘ignore’.

Then when I click onto a friend’s page, a friend who has come from the MySpace zone (as we shall call it) I find their page scrolls on for several thousand miles with application after pointless application.

Why, for the love of cake why?

Now there are even applications that FORCE you to send it to 20 friends BEFORE you use it, so you have no idea of the quality (or lack of it) that you’re sending on. They even come with personalised messages from your friends saying how they’ve found they’re ideal sexual position; would you like to find yours? NO, I wouldn’t.

What all of this crap means is that Facebook is going to drive away the very individuals it was created for in the first place, drive them away to the next social networking site. Which in my opinion will become Linked In, but that’s for another post. This will happen unless Facebook gets a grip on the influx of low quality members and spammed up applications.

Will Facebook sort this out, or does Mark Zuckerberg care more about his exit strategy and the billions of dollars he’ll receive if Facebook has more members, more advertisers and more developers making shitty little applications?

I think it’s the latter, there’s an iceberg ahead for Zuckerberg, and he’s sailing straight for it.

Google, SEO, Transformers

SEO Providers? I don’t think so

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Today I received a spam email from Nick Slevin from seoproviders.net. Nick asked if I needed SEO help to improve my rankings, and he sent the email to my address associated with the website TheTransformers.Net.

Get more traffic to your website using proven seo tactics. To learn more, please reply with the sites you would like to promote and the best way to contact you with the details.

Sincerely,

Nick Slevin

I’d normally delete an email like this without reading it, but after looking at the website for seoproviders.net, and realising the email address he’d sent the email to, I wanted to point out a few things.

Firstly, the website TheTransformers.Net ranks #1 in Google for ‘Transformers’. How exactly can seoproviders.net improve its ranking? Do they have some clever software that makes my website appear in people’s browsers BEFORE they search? Some sort of predictive search technology? I doubt it.

Transformers in Google

Secondly, look at the website for seoproviders.net…

SEO Providers

Seriously, go home Nick. This is the big leagues now.

CSA

Name and Shame the CSA: the Website

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Regular poster on MrDaz.com Poppy mentioned in this post about the CSA complaints website Name & Shame the CSA.

This looks like an excellent resource and features template letters and advice on dealing with the CSA. It also includes an interesting quote from Adolf Hitler which sounds like it could be in reference to the CSA.

“As long as government are perceived as acting in the best interests of children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty.”

I’ll be using this site extensively in the coming weeks, and blogging about here.

So much anger, so little time