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I might just stick to the Adam Sandler Horoscope instead; it seems to be pretty good most of the time.

It may not be M$ fanbois, corps and the government has hired ppl
to monitor and counter and down mod posts that paint them
in a bad light.

http://iaindale.blogspot.com/2007/08/government-to-monitor-blogs.html

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=337848

So when you see ppl mod you down they actually may be getting "paid" to do it.

Even if they ACTUALLY agree with you.

Brave new world indeed, "groupthink" via an ink and paper leash.

You mean like this?
This

I haven't done any search engine marketing and the only keyword that people find my site with is the name of the program. Strangely enough I have a FOSS project and while I did no SEM either with it it would rank high for a whole lot of random words that were found in the website's pages. Why it doesn't work like this for this site, I don't know.. There are lots of links to my website in tens of forums and blogs, yet Google seems oblivious to that..

Your skills as a coder will serve you well for SEO/SEM. I have an online business and had no experience with SEO until I read up on it. My site has been #1 in google for the past 3 years. (Quick tip: a forum works wonders for SEO) As a coder you you can ensure keyword relevance, density etc. I dont think you will have you a problem with your keywords, it looks relatively niche, but many have some difficulty competing with .edu domains. A few sites to get you started: seomoz.org ( they have a tool to determine the difficulty of your particular keyword) seochat.com http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ (keyword suggestion tool) Good luck!

That's sort of exactly what I was going to say. I think Google is getting kind of a bad reputation for being "too good" for their customers. Especially when it comes to adwords/adsense. Take a look at sites like http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ and you can find literally thousands of people who were dumped by Google with nothing more then a lockout of their account and an ambiguous email. That kind of customer service will get you nowhere. Also, they have a brutal history with some of their apps when it comes to just dumping existing users. Their recent fiasco Google video subscribers (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/11/12532 37) is a prime example of that.

Who is this guy and why should I care? Seriously. This is the first time I've heard about him, could someone please post a quick summary? His blog says I'm a boy... from San Diego, CA (USA). And I don't really have a whole lot else to say about myself and that isn't helping much. Thanks.

Read this post from his blog. He admits to ordering CD's online, but downloading the tracks from Napster.
http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/2004/11/itunes- music-store.html

From his web blog:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/2006/04/mpaa-of fers-to-settle-again.html

Shawn Says:
April 28th, 2006 at 11:50 am

I'm not really looking for donations for this... If you *really* want to donate for something, you can donate towards the new server farm (I'm sick of front-page bringing stuff to a crawl). But I certainly don't expect anyone to of course.

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/donate.html

From his web blog:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/2006/04/mpaa-of fers-to-settle-again.html

Shawn Says:
April 28th, 2006 at 11:50 am

I'm not really looking for donations for this... If you *really* want to donate for something, you can donate towards the new server farm (I'm sick of front-page bringing stuff to a crawl). But I certainly don't expect anyone to of course.

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/donate.html

If you read his blog he says "if you really want to donate contribute here" http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/donate.html

One thing that I think people are not understanding here is that I'm not trying to change the world with this. I'm not trying to "take down the MPAA", change any copyright or file sharing laws or anything else as grandiose as that...I've received countless emails/phone calls from people who treat me like the second coming of you-know-who, and just think people are blowing everything out of proportion (obviously).

And a disclaimer: while the link goes to a page asking for donations for a new server farm, in his comment here, it's what he'd rather people donate to.

here

Her is /.ers chance to put their money where their mouth is.
You can:
1. Buy their software here: http://www.digitalpoint.com/products/
2. Review and recommend their software.

They sell: data wizard, home inspection, isp billing domain management and radius server.

It should not be difficult to drive a few $millions in sales to them.

Consider using this for your own networks:

Name Stalker 1.2
Tool for managing your domains and monitor domains that you want. For Macintosh and Windows

or

Men & Mice Products
3 out of 4 DNS servers are incorrectly setup... find and fix problems with any DNS server. They carry Men & Mice's full line of DNS server and diagnostic tools. For Macintosh and Windows.

further informative modpoints for:
Relevant posts!!
http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/2005/11/loeb-an d-loeb-mpaa-extortion.html
http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/2006/04/mpaa-of fers-to-settle-again.html
http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/2006/06/im-dest roying-the-movie-industry.html

further informative modpoints for:
Relevant posts!!
http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/2005/11/loeb-an d-loeb-mpaa-extortion.html
http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/2006/04/mpaa-of fers-to-settle-again.html
http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/2006/06/im-dest roying-the-movie-industry.html

further informative modpoints for:
Relevant posts!!
http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/2005/11/loeb-an d-loeb-mpaa-extortion.html
http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/2006/04/mpaa-of fers-to-settle-again.html
http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/2006/06/im-dest roying-the-movie-industry.html

He's not exactly hiding.

His blog.
http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/

For anyone who wants to keep up with the story, Shawn Hogan is blogging the story at http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/category/law/.

It seems more and more when I try to find something on google all I get are a bunch of link farms.

Getting tired of the nazi's over at webmasterworld, I decided to see if I could find a new webmaster forum. I joined about six and started in the "submit my website" sections. It was just a feature that webmasterworld didn't have and I was curious what kind of sites other people are actually working on. I didn't sumbit my site, just looked through sites and tried to hand out some reviews, and here is what I found,

The "submit your website" section is full of people using barely modified site templates (game, forum, directories, cms, mfa sites, ect). It was a waste of space, no programming, no originality, nothing. Here's how a typical post would go, "I spent 8 hours modifying this template, everyone please take the time to review my work." Average reply, "I like the color scheme, you should make it validate." Validate! These people are downloading templates and modifying the header with some crappy jpg and you think they are going to take the time or even have the ability to validate? Worse though is if you dare to tell them their site is useless. They get mad and say, "I spent a WHOLE 8 hours working on this site, it will be the number one site in the world in a week."

The worst offender yet has to be Digital Point, not only because they are probably the biggest but because they allow you to post your own adsense if your are first or last poster. Great idea, the whole place is full of mountains of spam. You'll get plenty of replies though, gems like, "I agree" and "Good job".

Here's the part that fucking kills me though. These people making these crappy sites are making money. Some even have the fucking nerve to complain they are only making $40-$50/day. They all use adsense, they all spam the search engine with useless content, and they all link to each other to build backlinks. An honest person, building a good website couldn't possibly compete at their level. These people are self-linking and building overnight directories so fast that within a week they have 100's of backlinks to their crappy sites. An honest person waiting for real organic backlinks can't possibly compare. Google is giving some of these assholes PR6's for these slapped together template sites.

Don't believe me? Take a moment and head over to the Digital Point forums and click on the "NEW POSTS" link on the menu. You'd be lucky to find 2 or 3 posts that aren't complete garbage. I just looked and the in the top 10 are two people asking for help with starting wikipedia dupes. Just what the web needs, more duplicate content. Let me see, I want to find information on widgets. Okay, first result, wikipedia... oh, they don't have what I am looking for, let me check the second result... wikipedia clone, let me try the third result... answers.com (roll eyes)... fourth result... wiki clone, fifth result...

The speed at which these overnight sites are appearing is staggering. There is no way google can keep simply using algorithms to keep up with the flow.

Go to Google. Do a search. View the source. See all those "onmousedown" events on search results? They're tracking clicks in a way only Google users could love: AJAX.

(They may only do this if you've used another Google service, even if you have Search History turned off, but those 2 GB of mail storage were just so tempting weren't they?)

<a class=l href="http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/" onmousedown="return asq(event,this,'','','res','1','&sig2=QN3OZS8vdWbp J85DxPP1ZQ')">CDDA <b>Paranoia</b> Homepage</a>

It is time some not for profit organisation took out the RIAA and the MPAA on grounds of Vexatious litigation. It is clearly an abuse of process. Because they never get to court we never get to hear what evidence is to be applied, we never get to see what a real legal argument would do in a real trial.

I emailed the RIAA and their lawyers demanding to be made aware of the detection methodologies, techniques; as well as what particular methods of electronic distribution they are currently targeting.

I in return got some very serious comments that the information I asked for was of an extremly sensitive nature and in no uncertain terms made it obvious that I should stop persuing this asap.

How can one combat an unnacountable corporate entity? We have to fight them in their own manner. Funds need to be raised to help people to not just settle these cases then counter sue for defamation of character.

The DigitalPoint forum has a lot of AdSense discussion. It's quite often you hear about people getting banned for "invalid clicks". Rarely (or never) do you hear of people getting back in, or, unfortunately, ever getting any good explanation for it.

That's what I thought, too, but a bunch of forums have people complaining, I just wanted some verification.

One link here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=52 925&highlight=ie7

PageRank is not the problem. Yahoo has their own version of PageRank called Yahoo WebRank. While webrank is not available in a toolbar, it does exist in some form as a way to help prioritize results. If PageRank is responsible for anything then it's for communicating to the public a piece of the puzzle search engines use to sort results. Also - the number of links does not give you high Pagerank. Having a lot of links used to work circa 2003. Inbound links with high PR are also weightes less today than they were in the past. This is just evolution of search engines. People figure out the tricks, search engines react. Pagerank was a big problem when it carried too much weight - that's no longer the case today.

Let Gmail do your spam filtering for you.

That said, I have since switched to just using Quickbooks Pro, for no other reason than it's very simple and straightforward. I can also charge credit cards right from the Quickbooks interface, which makes it very convenient. All the other packages I've tried (including Freeside and Rodopi) simply included too many features for my very simple needs, or required software I didn't want to run (Microsoft SQL server). I even started writing my own system in PHP, but abandoned the project because it simply wasn't worth my time. Anyhow that's my experience with the matter. As you mentioned needing Radius support, Quickbooks is probably too basic for your needs, as it's geared to generic services and not Internet Services billing, but Optigold may fit the bill. Good Luck.

That said, I have since switched to just using Quickbooks Pro, for no other reason than it's very simple and straightforward. I can also charge credit cards right from the Quickbooks interface, which makes it very convenient. All the other packages I've tried (including Freeside and Rodopi) simply included too many features for my very simple needs, or required software I didn't want to run (Microsoft SQL server). I even started writing my own system in PHP, but abandoned the project because it simply wasn't worth my time. Anyhow that's my experience with the matter. As you mentioned needing Radius support, Quickbooks is probably too basic for your needs, as it's geared to generic services and not Internet Services billing, but Optigold may fit the bill. Good Luck.