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By Mark D, May 18, 2012 7:05 pm

This was the 3rd one (from a supposedly different company) in the last month or two:

Hello,

I was hoping you could help me out – who can I speak with regarding business development/partnerships. I work for blah blah blah, an Inc500 company, and we have been partnering with sites similar to yours. We would like to discuss ideas on monetizing your website without the clutter of advertisements or giving up editorial control. We work with sites that focus on all types of subjects – career, baby boomers, moms, military, and more.  Below are some solutions we specialize in:

·       Content Creation – producing high quality content is time consuming.  We have in-house writers specializing in article creation that would complement your current content. This service

·       Registration Path Solutions – Present targeted offers to your new or returning visitors via your sign-up registration, returning user login, and other high traffic areas of your site. We can serve relevant offers in the form of co-registration opt-ins (get paid if a user checks a box), interstitials, as well as pages with multiple offers.

·       Custom Widgets – Place widgets on high traffic pages, which can be customized for any audience or topic. We can compensate on an aggressive cost per lead, cost per click, or even a flat rate depending on your sites traffic.

·       Call Center Services – Fulfilling leads, sales, and warm transfers for a variety of industries.

·       Email Marketing Programs – We offer 2 kinds of email marketing programs. We can monetize your subscriber base by emailing them targeted offers. Or we can email our subscribers your offer, driving sales and/or leads.

Please let me know who I can speak with regarding these solutions. Any of the solutions that create revenue for your site are paid for within 30 days, via check, wire, or PayPal.

I don’t know why these people message me. I barely get any hits and don’t make any money off this website. If I could write for this blog when no one came around, pretty sure I can handle creating content when people actually read it occasionally.  Plus the whole point of buying content from someone really runs counter-intutitive to everything I’m doing here. I mean I know I’ve had some guest writers but really, most of this blog is my insane ramblings or whatever I find interesting.

Yes, I realize I haven’t been posting a lot lately. That and this is my 2nd straight post which is just me yelling at something I got via email. I’m going to be posting real content soon and explaining exactly where the hell I have been. On the bright side it’s not as if I have regular readers who are upset they haven’t seen the insanity in my mind recently.

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By Mark D, April 28, 2012 8:15 pm

But thanks for the laughs. You really shouldn’t bother getting a blog post removed which has gotten almost no attention. I had to double check the stats, but it has a total of 251 views in a year, of which 190 of them were in December when your banner on Wikipedia was in rotation. But hey, what do I know about the internet. Well at least tonight is going to be an easy night for new material, as here’s the fun letter that was in my inbox tonight:

From:
Ryan Kaldari
kaldari@gmail.com

Message:
I’ve been working at the Wikimedia Foundation for 2 years as a
software developer. Last year, they recruited me (and several other
community members and employees) to appear on a fundraising banner so
they could stop barraging people with Jimmy. After they put me on a
banner, I was then exposed to the full measure of human hate. No less
than 3 parody Facebook profiles were created, and numerous blogs and
discussion boards decided that I was the best thing to make fun of for
a couple weeks. All because I was encouraging people to donate to a
non-profit website. Most of these profiles and posts eventually
dropped off of Google, but your blog post is still on the first page
of Google matches for my name, as it has been for almost a year now. I
wouldn’t care so much, accept that it basically says I’m a liar, right
there in the headline for any potential employer or future girlfriend
to read when they google my name. I appreciate that the Wikimedia
Foundation has strong critics and I think such criticism is useful.
However, you should know that your criticism isn’t hurting the
Foundation, it’s only hurting me personally. I don’t want you to
remove your blog post, but I was wondering if there’s any chance you
could remove my name from the headline. The headline is still just as
effective without it. Looking through your website, it looks like we
have a lot in common and I hope you’ll read my email as a request from
another human being and not just from a representative of the
Wikimedia Foundation, which just happens to be my current employer.
Regarding the Foundation, you may want to look at their current
Charity Navigator profile as they are now one of the top ranked
charities in the country on both the Financial score and the
Accountability & Transparency score. I know this probably won’t change
your opinion of the Foundation, but I wanted to mention it, as the
Charity Navigator scores were one of the main criticisms in your blog
post. Anyway, thanks for listening. Peace.

When you sleep with the devil, you gotta pay your dues. Wikipedia is still duping people into donating when they have enough money to be solvent for the next 5-10 years at least. Except of course that they keep adding more and more staffers who are taking a bigger and bigger chunk out of the operating salary. And for what?

Comments (0)

By Mark D, April 20, 2011 8:16 am

I swear, the dumbest idea on the internet lately is universal log-ins. Being able to sign into 50 different sites once you signed into one site is NOT a good idea. It’s even worse when stuff like YouTube FORCES you to get a google account. I tried to sign into one of my multiple accounts only to get stopped and informed that I had to either connect the account to my google account or create a new google account. The whole reason that I had multiple email addresses is so my main google account wouldn’t get spammed.

But let’s not dwell on the idea of forcing you to log into services. One of the main reasons that a universal login is bad is that your not protected once someone hacks your account. For example I use multiple yahoo and google email accounts for differing things depending on the level of security I need. My email that gets a ton of spam is not going to be the same email I use to access paypal. Back in the day this was recommended, especially since if you were silly enough to link everything to one email account, someone could reset all your passwords. IE: There is no protection using multiple emails if they are all tied into the same account via password reset.

Making life easier for people is only setting them up for a bigger fall when their accounts get hacked. Now thankfully yahoo has finally taken some steps forward in actually protecting your passwords, but it seems like they’ve taken a giant leap backwards in allowing you to use yahoo accounts to log in to multiple sites. It’s not just them of course. It’s rather insane seeing the number of sites that you can log into using your facebook or something else. It’s sort of disconcerting when you visit a site every once in a  blue moon and you see your facebook info on their toolbar.

Idiots are just asking to have their whole online existence wiped with a single button stroke. At some point  there is going to be a huge mistake that compromises a whole bunch of accounts across multiple platforms and then maybe we can stop this stupidity. In the long run while having one sign in for multiple places makes life easy, it also makes you just that much more susceptible to being hacked.

It sort of amazes me that people don’t realize what they are doing. I mean people are shocked when you find their stuff on other websites because they use the same nickname everywhere. They are almost acting as though google somehow doesn’t exist. To make matters worse, even if you can’t access someones account on another site once your in their email, it is possible they used the same password for everything. All you need is one site that they are signed up to to email you their password without changing it and you can most likely access everything else.

It seems like people are just never going to learn until they get burnt.