Astroturfing

When I was on iLounge I found a new word, “astroturfing”. I sort of thought I knew what it meant, but didn’t look it up. Whatever it was, it was forbidden in the discussion areas. While doing some research on different iPod battery packs, I found one that had glowing reviews on iLounge. But a closer look revealed the person had only made one comment on iLounge ever. While reading some other sites, I found a very similar review. In fact it had exactly the same misspelling in it. I thought this must be astroturfing. But, according to Wikipedia what I was seeing was shilling, where a person claiming to be independent of the company pretends to be a satisfied customer. This technique is used in street cons like 3-card Monty and other places.

Astroturfing is when someone poses as multiple people who discuss the great qualities of some product trying to make it look like it has great grass roots support, when everything is fake (fake grass!). Wikipedia had a great example of this from the Iraq war in 2003 where a number of soldiers had written letters to the editor of their hometown papers saying how great everything was going in the war and how the media distorted everything. Apparently a number of these letters made it into newspapers before an editor who had gotten the same letter from two different people started poking around. A few quick Google searches turned up the exact same letter in other newspapers. In the end it all came down to an ambitious Lt. Colonel in the army who wanted to drum up support for the war.

Way Back Machine

I remember reading (or maybe Jeb told me; that’s kind of like reading) something about a website that archived past versions of web pages. That way you could go back and see what web pages used to look like last century. At lunch today we were talking about out-of-date web pages and I mentioned the Way Back Machine (which I remembered being the name of the site, but it is not the URL). At this point it was pointed out to me that the original Way Back Machine was how Mr. Peabody would go back in time on an old cartoon. Then we tried to remember whether Mr. Peabody was the dog or the other person and which one wore glasses (the dog did) and what the person’s name was . . .

Anyway, I found www.webarchive.org pretty quickly. I was hoping they would have some links to some of the most popular or interesting websites, but they pretty much leave it to you to look up URL’s and then they show you a list of archived pages of that site from different times. They did have one section of archived websites from September 11, 2001 that seemed like it would be interesting. But I entered GDOT’s URL to see what they had and even found some of the very first web pages that I had ever written, long since modified or deleted on my own computer.

Then I looked for mac.fiveforks.com and found stuff from way back in 2003, before blogs, when the site was called FOKAJ (in the title, FOJAK on the page itself). It doesn’t seem to save large pictures, or maybe it just isn’t saving pictures at all unless they are still in the original location. And the blogs don’t work well because they use separate style sheets that are not captured.

Amazon Q1 Results

The quarter ended yesterday, so I got the last of my data this morning. As I said earlier the results were much better than I expected.

I sold 23 Belkin Battery Backpacks, 2 BTI Battery ii’s, 2 Griffin Tunejuice batteries, and 2 iPod travel chargers. I’m amazed that so many people chose the Belkin battery pack, though I guess that’s what I would choose too and Amazon has the best price at $25 (the Apple Store charges the full list price of $50 for the same thing). Combined with a few other items like DVD’s, CD’s (thanks, Jeb!), bass strings, and software that sold, the total was $1,016.71 in sales with a commission of $60.78.

Continue reading “Amazon Q1 Results”

Commission Junction

I was updating some of my web pages and found out that buy.com had lower prices on some items than Amazon. Sometimes the difference was pretty significant so I thought it wouldn’t be right to avoid linking to buy.com just because I get a commission at Amazon. But of course that made me wonder if buy.com had an affiliate program. Turns out they do, but they run it through a third party called Commission Junction. That company has a bunch of other advertisers as well, so you can promote all kinds of different things, but the commissions are lower (3%) than Amazon. I decided to sign up since it is free anyway.

The sign-up was kind of a pain. I had to agree to three different screens of terms and conditions. I don’t think I had anything like that with Amazon. So right off I was a little put out with them. I only link to about three things at buy.com and they aren’t the big sellers that I link to Amazon, so the bottom line is I have only gotten a handful of clicks and no purchases so far. During the same period Amazon has been pretty slack as well, so I will give them a couple of more weeks, but if it doesn’t look like I’m going to make much of anything I think I will get out of the program and link to buy.com products anyway.

Katie on the Mend

Today I took Katie in to have her stitches and staples out. She was very excited that I put her on the leash this morning, but disappointed when we had to get in the car. The doctor said she is right where she should be, using her leg, but not putting a lot of weight on it. This is about where she was before the surgery. In the first entry I said I needed cheese to get Katie to take her medicine but, after buying the cheese, I remembered that isn’t how I get her to take medicine. Instead, I buy Alpo chunk-style canned dog food. I can put a pill completely in one of the large chunks and she eats it without chewing. Clio likes it because she gets chunks too; hers just don’t take as long to prepare.

Anyway, we’re all done with that. The incision is healing up really well. With her other leg it had opened up a little bit due to swelling and her taking a couple of staples out, but this time she didn’t have any problems. Once her fur grows back (her leg is mostly back to being black after being shaved and all white for the surgery) you probably won’t be able to tell she had surgery.

I still can’t take her for walks for another six weeks (I’ve been walking Clio some, but not twice a day like I usually do). Then I take her in for x-rays and hopefully she will get a green light for taking progressively longer walks.