General

Guangzhou Global Telecom - Stock Spam 2.0?

In previous articles, I spoke about some research which established that stock spam works, as well as mentioned a report about how stock spam works.

A quick reminder: Stock Spam are those image-based emails pumping small chinese firms. Buy Today! This stock is reaching for the stars!

Today, I discovered Stock Spam 2.0 over at Kiplinger.com: Meet Guangzhou Global Telecom .

Rather than send out millions of emails like other small Chinese firms, Guangzhou Global Telecom took a different approach: Buy media (seemingly indirectly) in some of the most read business publications around the world talking about how great their company is.

Ok, now I know this technically isn't spam, but rather stock pumping (or "marketing", depending on what you do for a living), but it does awake an interesting point:

As society becomes more wary of online scams, will it "give back" authority to traditional media?

How would this situation played out twenty years ago, if a company with financials like Guangzhou Global Telecom bought advertising in the Economist and Financial Post? If you recieved an unsolicited email about Guangzhou Global Telecom, how would you react?

Anyway, slow news day, food for thought -

New Mediaist has been slashdotted!

Yes, that is the smell of geek in the air - welcome slashdot brethren!
I was able to survive the traffic jump even though I'm on a cheap Godaddy hosting account. The reason? Cache!

The reason why many websites crash when bombarded by traffic is because most websites aren't actually "static" - but rather are created on-the-fly from a series of records in a database. In other words, each time you visit the website, you are in fact asking the website to query a database and retrieve some information. Therefore, if too many people visit the website at once, the database receives to many queries, and everything just crashes.

The solution to this problem is a caching layer: a system which detects which web pages are being regularly accessed, and creates a copy of the information requested from the database for these web pages, so the database doesn't have to be called each time a user arrives.

For word press, the software which runs this blog, caching layer is available via this plug in.

To comment or no comment?

By default, my blog has commenting disabled. Initially, this was done for two reasons: to avoid blog spam, and to prevent my friends from posting inappropriate messages, as friends tend to do.

There is also the philosophy that having a blog with comments enabled - but no comments - is a sign of a bad blog, and may cause you to actually lose readers as a result. This is a common problem in "social medias" like forums, social networks, etc... - they are basically classified as uncool until that tipping point of popularity is reached, and strangers feel comfortable to jump in. Here's a hint: If you're launching a forum/blog/etc... , fill in a whole bunch of threads/comments yourself - at least one page worth. Make sure to "beat the path", making it easier for strangers to trust it.

I also find myself judging the quality of blogs sometimes by the quality of its comments - no comments means you can only judge the quality of the blog based on the writings.

Anyways, I've rambled enough. Feel free to comment :)

Us humans are so predictable!

Anna Nicole Smith highest ranked search improved by google

Nothing really that shocking here. See last paragraph of my previous posts for explanation as to why I took the time to post this image ;)

Dissecting the story of the big money blogger

(Huge web traffic numbers doesn’t always mean huge profit)

Scrooge McDuck
Step 1. Start a website
Step 2. Sell advertising
Step 3. ????
Step 4. ????
Step 5. Profit!

TotalNumberOfBlogsOnTheInternet++;

Welcome to a currently untitled blog about my passions: interactive media and entrepreneurship - that ambiguous area where media, marketing, technology and entrepreneurship collide.

I'm your host, Ari.

Great! So what is this specifically blog about?

1. This blog is not about technical implementation.
Although an understanding of digital technology is essential to the understanding of interactive media strategy, there are already many blogs and tutorials which cover technicalities. While this blog will regularly touch on such topics as SEO, User Interface Design, Technology, and New Media Trends, it will try to do so from the strategic viewpoint.

2. This blog is about interactive media's relationship with business.
There are a lot of things in the interactive media universe which, although super cool, don't make much business sense.

3. So, if you are interested in the collision of media, technology and marketing, you'll probably find this blog interesting.

... and even if you're not interested, you will likely find some cool stuff here. So please stay.

Finally, a disclaimer: interactive media is a very young subject. I'm bound to get some things wrong. Help me further develop concepts and ideas. A major company I interviewed with had a job posting for a VP Interactive: 7-10 years experience in interactive media required. In other words, they wanted someone who has been employed in interactive media since 1996. How many large interactive media roles/firms existed in 1996? Remember, the first popular web browser was only released in 1993.

In other words, the area of interactive media is still developing, and many businesses still don't know exactly what interactive media is, or what to do with it. This blog is my attempt to further develop my understanding of interactive media as it continues to mature.

re: the title of this post, TotalNumberOfBlogsOnTheInternet++ is a reference to a common way of incrementing a variable by one in many computer programming languages. In the future, I'll try to keep the geek humor to a minimum.

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