Oct
23
2009

Bizarre screenshot of the day: RSS directory?

Ok, firstly don’t get your hopes up – there isn’t a bizarre screenshot every day. But I just got this one when I was looking for RSS directories to add a blog RSS feed to.

I’d just added the RSS feed to Goldenfeed, and saw a link underneath to another RSS directory, ‘readablog’. So I clicked on it and got this error screen:

Sounds like a perfectly normal RSS and blog directory so why has Alexa toolbar come up with this stuff???

Sounds like a perfectly normal RSS and blog directory so why has Alexa toolbar come up with this stuff???

For once I agree with Alexa: ‘Why am I seeing this page?’

Firstly, where did the ‘porn’ search come from? Going back to Goldenfeed, all I can see in the status bar is the URL.

Then, looking at the listings, where did Alexa toolbar get those from? OK Home Cinema could have some relevance. And maybe Royal Caribbean Cruises are trying to spice up their image (unlikely, but you never know). But ‘Christian Child Ministry’?? Is someone having a joke on this site, Google bombing them or something like that? And Cisco Systems – some lonely nerds with a networking fetish?

I can’t help wondering why Readablog has been lumbered with this. It has such a wholesome, non-X-rated name. Looking at its page in wholinkstome.com, none of the incoming links have adult sounding names, and it seems to rank best for keywords about marriage and babies.

Looking at its page on Alexa, it seems to have been related to other RSS directories. The closest to dodgy term I can find in its keywords is ’swimsuit’. Which isn’t even dodgy.

Meanwhile, quantcast has its visitors as mostly male, in their late 30s, without kids and with college degrees. Ok, I’m starting to get a little creeped out about how much the net seems to know about us…

In any case, I can’t see any reason for these Alexa toolbar results (or Cisco Systems, etc for that matter!) Has ‘porn’ become another word for ‘website’?

Finally, I check up on Goldenfeed, and find it has let’s say more of a mixture of stuff. Oops. And there’s my feed, on the home page! Woo hoo!

Now I’m just wondering what the Adsense will come up with for this page…

Oct
17
2009

Sharing Profit from Adsense on a Community Website

Sharing Profit from Adsense on a Community Website

After my first experiments with Adsense and artificial intelligence, I thought it might be interesting to try it out on a website with more traffic. (However great my privacy and ‘under construction’ pages are, they aren’t the most visited pages on the web!) So when I discovered there was a scheme for sharing profit from Adsense on a community website I was using anyway, it seemed like a great opportunity: after all, what was there to lose?
Continue reading Sharing Profit from Adsense on a Community Website →

Oct
6
2009

Back to your Desks, Peasants!

Employers take out Life Insurance Policies on their Employees

Is it right that employers take out life insurance policies on their employees?  Most employees do not even know if their employers have taken out life insurance policies against them, and undertandably so:  how could it feel to work for a company, knowing the company would profit from your death?
Continue reading Back to your Desks, Peasants! →