NaBloWriMo is National Blog Writing Month – the annual challenge to post each and every day throughout the 30 days of November to your blog. Register with the site and join our intrepid band of heroes, vagabonds and misfits. You know you want to.

Here’s the link NaBloWriMo Good luck and get writing.

• Waste the time of the people that read and forward them
• They cause well meaning citizens to notify the authorities and waste public funds and resources only to find out there is no “missing person” or other crime
• Shifts public opinion negatively. Pepsi doesn’t hate God, Starbucks DOES support our troops, and Obama isn’t a Muslim (as far as you know, and he’s in the whitehouse now so quit spreading the hate. (I voted for the other guy).

Here’s what I do to verify an email. I copy the subject line of the email (if it isn’t descriptive enough I will note a couple of key words in the message) then I go to google and paste it in with the word “snopes” (without the quotes). Within the first couple of links you’ll find a link that either tells you the story is a hoax or is true.

Snopes.com is THE last word in internet hoaxes, scams, and urban legends. They heave been collecting them since 1995.

On any given day I probably delete at least a couple of emails with subject lines that begin with “Fw:” Its not that I’m not interested in what my friends and family get passionate about, its just that I’ve been around these Internet pipes for quite a while now. Nowhere more than the web is the saying, “If its too good to be true, then it probably is” more true. Most of these emails are impossible at there primise. There is no way for Applebys to track how many people you sent a message to so that they can send you a $50 coupon. There is no way that the disposed ruler of a small African nation has access to your email address.

Read every email as if the sender approached you in a parking lot. How easily would you fall for what they were selling then?

Please people be careful out there.

I’ve had a couple of questions lately about spam and how one gets such offensive spam if you don’t go to “those” kinds of web sites. Unfortunately it doesn’t matter where you’ve surfed while online, your email is not transmitted to websites when you visit them. Spam works the other way around. There are many ways spammers get your email address; They will buy email lists from “brick and mortar” retailers, online retailers, people who get you to fill out slips of paper to win a cruise, or anyone else that loves having money more than they care about what’s in your in-box. Or, Programmers build software (“bots” short for ‘robots’) that scour the web looking for strings of words that look like email addresses. someone@domain.com (even now someone@domain.com is getting collected and will get unsolicited email).

“E-mail addresses are collected from [among other places] chatrooms, websites, newsgroups, and viruses which harvest users’ address books, and are sold to other spammers. Much of spam is sent to invalid e-mail addresses.” –wikipedia

As for these bots that are actively, constantly searching the internet, it means that if your email address is posted on a website in plain text it can be collected by one spammer and sold to thousands of others. You should instead use a contact form so people can contact you without “seeing” your email address. Your email can also be intercepted, or if your ISP hasn’t properly secured its SMTP (outgoing) mail server then it is vulnerable to hacking. Or if someone else has responded to a piece of spam while also forwarding it to you at your email address. Or if you ever responded to a piece of spam by telling them NOT to send to you again Then you’ve just told that spammer that they have proof that your email is a “live” account and will then sell the list to other spammers… I could go on. The main point is that the average email address is only live for 6 minutes before it begins to get spam, and there is nothing you can do to stop it, only slow it down.

We have a client, a Women’s Hospital, run by women, with a staff of women nurses, and all women patients. They were being overrun by spam of the worst sort. Male Enhancement, Nigerian money schemes, little blue, red, or white pills, etc. They invested in a device called the “Spam Firewall” by Barracuda as soon as we turned it on 90% of their email was blocked, none of that blocked email was their business correspondence. Imagine that, 90% of their incoming email was trash. Unfortunately the spam firewall costs about 1500 bucks with a 500 a year renewal. I’m trying to find a way to let customers route their email through a company spam firewall and then back to them to combat this issue without having to spend an arm and a leg for it. The way I combat it is with rules set up in my email client. When a new wave comes in I build a rule to try and block it. But as soon as I do I they change the wording and get it past so I have to edit or build a new rule.

And as for the content, lets face it, if you want to be profitable but you don’t know your audience then you should prey on the most base characteristics of humans, sex, greed, and fear.

“Be better in bed,” “If you help me move this money I’ll give you some,” and “If you don’t send this to 10 people God won’t love you.”

If you are one of the folks trying to connect spam with online activity you’re looking in the wrong place. I have many many clients that have never visited a questionable site that get flooded with inappropriate spam. Clean out your junk mail box daily and leverage all the rules you can with your email software. Once an email is on the list, no matter how it got there, your doomed to get spam. And Internet filters don’t have anything to do with your email. Services like K9, OpenDNS, and others only stop your internet browser. This is only helpful when clicking on a link inside the email, which is possibly the dumbest thing you can do with your computer. K9 keeps a password protected history of websites visited which will tell you exactly where someone has been surfing.

Some Services:

JunkEmailFilter.com – I’ve heard this one highly praised by the guy quoted on the site.

AVG - Love the Virus protection but I’m not sure about how in-depth the spam blocker is. Worth a call to support to find out.

Kaspersky Labs Internet Security – Highly configurable Internet protection suite with spam guards

SpamHelp.org – Software list, please don’t use the challenge/response software its highly annoying to your friends.

SpamHelp.org – Managed/Hosted Anti-Spam Service

BTW Here’s a sample of my Junk mail folder. Notice the repeat of subjects, these would have been sent by the same spammer from multiple hijacked PCs or servers.

Train yourself to see potential. The best place to start is by reading Seth Godins blog on marketing. Seth is hailed as a marketing genius and a lot of people pay him a lot of money to tell them how to change their businesses for the better.

Turn off the radio and start listening to podcasts. Podcasts are little homemade radio or TV shows made by people interested in a certain subject. You get to them using iTunes software in the iTunes Store (or other Podcast aggrigators) (Don’t worry they are free) Listen to as many as you can find in your field. Install iTunes, (uncheck the two boxes and you don’t have to fill in your email). Once your in the iTunes store do a search for what interests you. I suggest listening to everything at least a couple of times. Some presenters have a very dry or plain delivery but don’t let that distract you from the content. Do searches on multiple items. If your into screen printing then listen to a podcast on design. If your running your own computer parts store listen to a couple of podcasts on accounting. Get well rounded. Use your time to focus on your business. While listening, you’ll be surprised how your mind will start to wander into other possibilities for growth or alternative revenue streams. The only thing you’ll get listening to the radio or watching TV is distracted from your goals.

One reason is that I’ve owned 13blue.com for a couple of years. It’s only been a blog for a couple of months but anything I’ve ever posted has had my name on it so, every time google comes around to read the page it sees my name. I’m sure if you searched for “computer how-to” or “computer blog” I’d be about position 60 million. The other advantage I have is a very unique name and I’m the only person with my name to update a website on a regular basis.

Tips for better results in Google and other search engines:

If you just bought your domain name you’ll have a much harder road. From what I’ve read it takes a few months to even show up after the google bots have spidered you.

It helps to have your site “readable” not for the average reader but for google and update it often. This is where “Web Accessibility” comes in. That is “accessibility” as in for persons with disabilities. Persons with special needs often use devices other than a keyboard, mouse, or monitor to “view” the web. They could be using a Refreshable Braille Display, or software that reads the page from top to bottom.

A screen reader is a software application that attempts to identify and interpret what is being displayed on the screen. This interpretation is then represented to the user with text-to-speech, sound icons, or a braille output. Screen readers are a form of assistive technology (AT) potentially useful to people who are blind, visually impaired, or learning disabled, often in combination with other AT such as screen magnifiers.*

As these devices read the page they can only see the text. Pictures don’t display nor do video, flash, or those images used so you can get just the right look for your page heading. Another mistake is to use “Table Based Design,” this is where the page is arranged into blocks of content for aesthetic purposes. This may be fine for sighted viewers but the screen readers will follow the page from top to bottom left to right and information could be lost or skipped, especially if the reader has to go through a long list of hyperlinks. The correct way is to use xhtml for content and css for the presentation these devises skip the css and read straight through the content.

WHY YOU CARE!!

You care about this because this is the same way google “reads” your pages. I build from scratch or use WordPress to give a good balance of presentation and accessible content. Doing your own code may be hard if you are using a pre-packaged site builder or an e-store service so look for ones that tout “Accessibility” and “Web Standards”. I did a site for a friend and he went from page 7 to page 3 because the phone company was doing his site in flash or some crazy homegrown CMS and google couldn’t read the content. I built it from scratch in a text editor and packed as many “keywords” as I could, when google “scanned” the page this time the content could be cataloged and was seen as relevant to people searching in his retail sector.
There is a video at headscape.co.uk on the right side of the page half way down that explains a lot. If you’re familiar with the term “Web Accessibility” then watch the whole thing. If not, I’d start at time code 11:00, and the big point gets going at time code 14:00. When you’re finished watch it again and take notes. I listen to this guys web design podcast. He’s usually pretty funny but he’s very passionate about this subject so he gets a bit serious.

*Screen reader. (2008, March 28). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:04, April 21, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Screen_reader&oldid=201656269