| LED Digest 1944: Is Google's Toolbar Stealing? |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. March 15, 2005 Issue #1944 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ======= NEW ===================== --== Google's Toolbar Stealing? ==-- ~ John Barendrecht "Anyone beside me opposed to toolbars rewriting web pages?" ==== CONTINUING ================= --== RSS Feeds, Spam, and The Future of Publishing ==-- ~ Mark Roberts "It was like striking a lighted match in a fuel bunker." ~ Phil Tanny "...no matter what course we take our publishing community will incur large costs and risks." --== Creating HTML Ezines ==-- ~ Don Baker "My company offers a web-based, automated email management system..." ~ Renee Kennedy "A great free email program is DADA mail..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== PHP, MySQL and Search Engines ==- ~ Super Perez --== Blocking Email Forwarding ==-- ~ Tom Aman ~ Dave Starr --== Working with Framed Sites ==-- ~ Martha Retallick ====== NEW ====================================== From: John Barendrecht Subject: Google Toolbar steals $ The new beta v3 Google toolbar, takes ISBN numbers on your site and provides a cute button "provide book information". This is simply a drop down box that links directly to Amazon's book page. If your site had links to Amazon with affiliate code, users may bypass your "buy" button in favor of Google's "Provide Book Information". It also makes your ISBN # a clickable link to Amazon, without affiliate code. If you have a US address on your site, it rewrites your web page to make that a clickable link to Google Maps. If your default search engine is not Google, it tries to change it to Google. There is Google toolbar busting software for those who oppose this idea, search Google for "Google Autolink". To see what's new in v3: http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/topic.py?topic=238 When Microsoft called this "Smart Tags" everyone opposed this idea. Is it any better now that Google is trying to "steal" your web traffic and affiliate income? (Disclaimer - I do sell books but we don't list ISBN # so Google Toolbar does not affect us, for now. What if Google scans your web page and sees if any text matches a book or video title at Amazon?) Anyone beside me opposed to toolbars rewriting web pages? John Barendrecht Centralhome.com Company Inc http://www.centralhome.com ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Mark Roberts Subject: RSS Feeds I have been watching / reading all the RSS posts with great interests of late and thought I would add my two cents to the discussion. I conducted an IT seminar recently for area IT professionals and university students. One of my speakers jumped into web technology and mentioned, among other things, RSS feeds and blogging. It was like striking a lighted match in a fuel bunker. Everyone wanted to know more about both of the topics and no matter where the speaker went, questions from the audience kept bringing him back to these topics. It became quite obvious that everyone was hungry to know more. Since that time, I have been gathering information about these two topics and plan to present a series of talks on them in an effort to fill the knowledge gap. In playing with some of the tools freely available on the net, I have found them to be extremely easy to use and configure. My RSS feed reader downloaded in seconds and I was able to configure a number of feeds within 5 - 10 minutes. That was over a month ago and have never had a bit of trouble with it since. It has also open me to a whole new world of information that I never realized was that easily accessible. Next, what would it take to be able to display these feeds on my web site instead of relying on a feed reader? Again, not a problem. Within less than 3 minutes I was able to download software and display these same RSS feeds on one of my web pages. I already produce a eCommerce / eMarketing newsletter that I email on a regular basis. I usually just collect bits of information to share and periodically put them together in newsletter form and mail them out. Now, thanks to RSS feeds, I am going to "publish" those bits of information as I get them. My customers will see them immediately in their RSS feeds, visitors to my site will see them immediately as I publish them, and finally, I will still publish my newsletter (which will now be more of a digest of the information) on a regular basis for those who do not regularily visit my web site and do not, for whatever reason, subscribe to my RSS feeds. This will allow me to cover all my bases. Difficult? No, not really any more difficult that publishing my newsletter. I have an XML template where I can just fill in the blanks. Takes all of 2 minutes or less of extra time. Soon I will build an RSS generater for my site so that it will take even less time. I have a lot more to learn about RSS and it is really exciting. Soon, I may even launch into blogging. Mark Roberts Roberts Computing Systems http://www.robertscomputing.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Phil Tanny Subject: Spam and RSS Thanks to everybody for a great RSS education. The quality of the posts on this list is quite impressive. What a shame that LED 1943 sits in my inbox right next to a "publication" whose content I can not describe without offending everyone here. I really have no argument with the explanation of RSS's current weaknesses as an alternative to email. I've learned a good bit from the posts that explored these weaknesses. Thank you for that. I would like to point out that our discussion of RSS is a now institutionalized aspect of the spam era. Solutions to the spam era present themselves (white listing for instance) and then we rush to point out why these solutions are not perfect, and will involve some cost to somebody. There are many good points in these arguments, so a group consensus develops that we should wait for some future event before we finally separate ourselves from the spammers. A great gravity of understandable self interest pulls the consensus towards the hopeful but vague theory that sooner or later somebody will invent a solution to spam that doesn't involve us paying any price. I would like to stress that I am very sympathetic to this process, and am definitely part of it myself. But after 10 years of this process it's hard to escape the fact that addressing the spam challenge in this manner has produced an ever more impressive record of failure. A constructive approach has to weigh the real risks and costs of any change, against the real risks and costs of continuing on the same path. I believe a key point to understand is that no matter what course we take our publishing community will incur large costs and risks. Once that reality is grasped, the argument for decisive change becomes more compelling, in spite of the real weaknesses in any of the proposed solutions. The risk that concerns me the most is that the bond of credibility with readers, a crucial asset that lies at the heart of our ability to communicate (and sell), will be permanently polluted if we continue to publish for too many more years elbow to elbow in the reader's inbox with child porn and the like. If this was TV, how long would you want a documentary featuring your business to be played on the cable scam / porn / mafia channel? How impatient would you be to break that branding association? Spammers are polluters poring toxic chemicals in to the public trust groundwater with gleeful abandon. Sooner or later the bulk email planet will be uninhabitable. The question is, will our readers leave first, leaving us behind? Or will we leave first, leading our readers to a better place where we remain leaders in their eyes? If we insist on waiting for every reader to master RSS before leaving the spam channel aren't we saying to the readers: "You be the leader, I can't deal with it." Again, great thread, thanks to Adam and all posters. Phil Tanny http://keywords-for-you.com ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Don Baker Subject: HTML ezines > I'm interested to hear more of the nuts and bolts > of how to build an HTML e-zine. Can anyone > recommend sites that show how to do this. - Sascha Hewitt, LED 1941 My company offers a web-based, automated email campaign management system called MailerConnect; it's similar to Constant Contact and other email campaign tools. You can have a free, fully functional trial using a small group of addressees. Check it out at: http://www.mailerconnect.com/ Don Baker NSI Partners www.nsipartners.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Renee Kennedy Subject: HTML ezines A great free email program is DADA mail Available here: http://mojo.skazat.com/ I have found this program easy to install and very intuitive to use. The only drawback is that it doesn't handle bounces. It will send both HTML and plain text emails, although you will have to know how to create the HTML. Renee Kennedy e-Healthcare Solutions, Inc. www.e-healthcaresolutions.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Super Perez Subject: PHP and search engines I'm starting to convert my sites to PHP / MySQL driven sites. Would anyone know if google and yahoo search engines are capable of spidering the info in databases of PHP / MySQL? Thanks in advance! Super Perez http://beeps.net ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Tom Aman Subject: Forwarding email > My ISP recently started blocking mail that is 'relayed' > to them. For years I've been using the mail forward > function with my various web hosting accounts and > having all mail sent to the ISP account. - Kevin Decker, LED 1941 First a suggestion: for the web host that is using the relay function, could you not forward that email to one of your other accounts. Then it would be forwarded from there to your ISP account. Second, a comment: I would point out to your ISP that they may feel they are reducing SPAM, but it is a really lousy solution since they are also blocking legitimate email. Good way to lose customers. (And you could be one of them if you can you move to a different ISP.) This situation only highlights the problem of actually blocking or trashing email via any kind of rule(s) or filters. It will invariably result in the loss of some good email. Better to use a filter within your email client that will just identify it and move it to a "junk" folder so you can quickly review it for any good messages that may have got caught in error. Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Dave Starr Subject: Forwarding email Good advice from "zeke" Brumage. I wonder if the original contributor could expand more on the problem they have with multiple email accounts? I currently have 14 accounts configured in Outlook ... things like sales, info, abuse at several websites, plus my ISP provided email as a backup on a completely separate server. It takes but seconds to configure a new account from the Outlook end, and, although I just have all mine dump into a common inbox folder, it's very little more work to have messages route into separate folders .. just configure an Outlook rule to do so. The email clients (free) provided by Netscape, Mozzilla etc all do this as well (perhaps better?) than Outlook. GMail and other web-based emails allow POPing as well, either free or as a paid service. I feel perhaps I have unintentionally failed to grasp what the problem is? Best regards Dave Starr www.satviz.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Martha Retallick Subject: Frames Speaking as someone who has designed websites since 1995, I can only recall one time that someone insisted on having a frames-based site. Try as I did to tell him that frames presented a variety of usability problems which could hinder his site's effectiveness, and that the site could get along perfectly well without frames, he just HAD to have them. That meeting ended abruptly when I walked out the door. Yes, the Customer Is Always Right gurus are probably lining up to whack me over the head, but the incident described above took place almost four years ago. And, to the best of my knowledge, the "Must Have Frames" site never went live. My policy toward bull-headed clients remains the same: If they're going to be that determined to shoot themselves in the foot, they can find another Web designer. Martha Retallick http://www.postcardmarketingsecrets.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains © Copyright 1995-2005 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." - Michael Jordan |
