So where’s my gripe? I had to setup a new bank account this week and I was amazed how much is still done on paper. My first attempt was to bring the correct documents; unfortunately I missed one of the items that were required so I blame myself for the 45 minute queue. The next day I returned with the basic items such as my proof of work via contract and tax form. My first hurdle was when I had to provide the original documents and not the clear colour photocopies that I arrived with. Frustrated I might have to come back on a third day I asked why they would need the originals; obviously you won’t be keeping them as proof. No of course not, they need to sign and verify that the paper work I was providing was legitimate. I’m not against old age but I had no belief that she was capable of seeing a forgery via Photoshop anyway. The codes and references on my tax form were redundant; there is no online database to prove they were real either. Ok she could see my frustration and she let me off and made a BLACK AND WHITE photocopy signing that it was the official. A black and white copy, not stored electronically anywhere that I could see. Possibly taken on the poorest quality photocopier judging by the fact as I was continually questioned each letter when entering the details. I was thinking what happens in the future if someone wants to verify this document; what if the clerk isn’t there anymore does her signature mean anything? For me it’s quite mind boggling to know there is so much technology out there but we are using the same procedures we had maybe 10 years ago. In fact during the registration process, I could see the majority of the questions had to be filled online and it occurred to me I might have been able to do this myself from home. Ok I actually had to come back a third time, but that’s because the woman who could authorise my account was out on lunch and I kindly explained I’ve already used my one hour lunch break and do you mind if I come back tomorrow for my account details.

The third day I return to collect my account details with relief to say the least. I am told the basics; your card will arrive in 5-7 days and a few days after that you will receive your PIN. Ok, anything else? Oh yeah you have to come in to the bank to activate your card, WHY? Ok I’ll bring in a cup of my urine while I’m at it. Do it this way, fuck my card I don’t one. Give me an app and my phone is secure with two levels and I’ll pay that way. Ok we aren’t ready for that, so send me my physical card and at the same time send me my PIN via email, I have two layer verification on my Gmail. It requires my password a random number via my phone to access the account known as Google Authentication app. I mean the thief has to break in to my letter box and steal my phone while getting past the phone PIN, grid pass and know my physical Gmail password. Trust me this isn’t hard to setup and I guarantee there are twelve year old kids already doing it. I am concerned muggings might deter from the regular ATM machines and happen in back alleys with a few keystrokes and a flick knife but at least the transaction is logged to the muggers would be account. Hopefully his account isn’t registered in Botswana where they have no jurisdiction.

We live in a day of technology but the innovation is taking far too long to reach the real world. I see “Game” the company is in some financial difficulties and I actually worked for them for two years during college. I’m sorry people are going to lose their jobs, but I hope they start allowing us to download games on launch date. It makes sense, cheaper to make, no packaging or distribution and people can download on midnight launch so they wake up to play what they’ve been waiting for. Just don’t charge us the same price because that’s not fair. In fact it’s never been fair to charge all games the same price. I mean GTA 4 has hours and hours of game play whereas Disney’s Magic Micky’s Time Travel Extravaganza on the PS3 costs the same price. Actually I don’t know if that last game exists I just wanted to try and spell extravaganza, but you get my point.

Doesn’t matter how frustrated I get, this video always makes me laugh out loud.

Updated: Six physical letters later (waste of paper) and a form I have to fill in and send off via mail to activate my card. Electronic email activation would have been just fine.

When something comes together and actually works, it’s such a unique buzz. Next benchmark is 1k; I hope it doesn’t take another year :\

What’s an Affiliate?

Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.

What’s Cyber Squatting?

Cybersquatting (also known as domain squatting), according to the United States federal law known as the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else.

Right so based on the above definition (Thanks Wiki but this SOPA blackout is killing me, thank fk for Google Cache) a company can claim a domain if it’s being used in “bad faith”. In basic if we look a few years back, Bob The Builder, Mel Gibson, TeleTubbies.com and various other sites were used to advertise online pornography. On a quick side note, if it wasn’t for porn the internet wouldn’t be where it is today. It’s what the internet is primary used for on a daily basis if you like it or not and is likely responsible for a majority of the leaps in streaming, speed and other improvements. That’s a conversation for another day. Anyway where was I, so yeah after a law was passed in1999 the domains names could be claimed back. One of the ways to determine if a site has the right to a domain name is the day it was registered Vs. the company trademark e.g. I registered eDrinker.com back in 2006 and should an energy drink company called eDrinker come out in the near future there is no way they can take my domain, as I’ve been using it to talk crap on for years.

Just to clarify before I go on, I don’t agree on cybersquatting, I hate it just as much as everyone else. I also hate companies that buy up typos such as pocker (poker) or keys that are close to each other like “pojer.com”. Believe me when I say this is an industry in its own right and I’m sure there is some serious money to be made, but nowadays it’s all robots buying up the names.

Right so one of the conversations was surrounding a well-known poker site that closed down an affiliate because he had a similar domain name. For obvious reasons I’ll use an example; the name of the site was www.HoldemMaster.com but the affiliate brought the domain www.Hold’emMasterPoker.com. Now I can understand claiming a domain if the affiliate was marketing a poker room that was a competitor but that wasn’t the case, this person was actually advertising the Hold’emMaster brand. They told me this guy had been making a lot of money from content and names similar to its brand. So when they closed it down, I asked why (I used to own www.IAskWhy.com)? As explained above the company HoldemMaster were getting their money from customers playing and the affiliate was getting their 30%, so where’s the problem. Their argument was this was already money that belonged to the brand, well I disagree. This person had the foresight to see an edge in the market he/she deserves that money and as well. I don’t claim to be an affiliate guru but I’ve had my fair share of affiliate programs in the past so I understand the basics. As an affiliate you’re provided with banners and logos for your site to market the brand and so what if they used your name in the URL, they just went that extra distance to promote the brand and the affiliate ends up getting penalized for all the hard work. If you don’t believe me here is the term which can be found in most affiliate programs be gambling or another online industry’s:

“An Affiliate shall not establish any Facebook, Twitter or other social network domains, blog domain, profile name or display name containing any names, words and phrases that are or can be deemed to form part of a Client Brand.

An Affiliate is restricted from purchasing any domains that include any names, words and phrases that are or can be deemed to form part of a Client Brand or bidding on any keywords or keyword phrases that include, any names, words and phrases that are or can be deemed to form part of a Client Brand in any format in any pay per click (PPC) search engine. This includes, but is not limited to, the following search engines: Overture, Google, Kanoodle, FindWhat, ePilot and Ah-ha.

An Affiliate is restricted from utilizing derivatives of any names, words and phrases that are or can be deemed to form part of a Client Brand in URLs and directory names for the intention of search engine optimization”.

Above are the terms and conditions for “Bodog” which I currently use for my website www.BetCage.com. So what are they afraid of? Well they feel they are entitled to anything that goes with their brand name and they are worried the general public might believe you are an official site for the company. If you ask me it’s just greedy, they did what your marketing department missed and if your both making money who gives a shit.

Now get this, do you know what they do when they get that domain back? I would say most companies auto redirect to their official site e.g. you type www.HoldemMasterpoker.com in to your browser and it takes you straight to www.HoldemMaster.com. They can’t keep the content that went with that site; this belongs to the person that originally set it up, so all that good SEO and content just disappears. That also means Google doesn’t give a fuck about that website anymore so don’t expect to find it again when searching those keywords. In fact the only people it will affect are the original customers that type the URL directly into their browser. They will be redirected to the official website. Well I guess that’s what they wanted, that small pocket of customers to find the real site and as a penalty they just lost an inbound link to the site and any future traffic from that domain. Just in case anyone was thinking it, Google doesn’t like duplicate content.  If were to own several domains e.g. Poker, PokerKing, PokerLightning.com and they all had the same text. In fact Google will penalize you for it, hence the reason why no big businesses do it. Again if I were to own Pepsi.de then I agree that belongs to Pepsi but if I were to own www.PepsiTatesGreat.com and I were advertising Pepsi then where’s the harm.

Just another little tip bit of information if you didn’t know and it’s something I only found out last year. I hope I don’t need to write about this whole SOPA issue going on in the United States because no doubt you’ve probably hit a page today protesting. When you setup a website you have a domain name (www.WTF.com etc) and you need hosting (a server in which your information is stored). So domain names can be brought all around the world. For example I once owned Oliver.me (Montenegro) and I brought hosting in the UK so you’d think to take down my site you have to take it up with one of those countries right. Well no there are various ways the U.S. (World Police) can tackle it. At present they trying to go through your internet service provider (see video below for 101) but did you know they also have the right to obtain a .com domain name even if the information isn’t even hosted in the U.S. This is because ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is based in the United States and they are more than happy to help seize domain names they feel the world can do without. Well after a few years of domain seizing they realise they need to step it up a level by fighting it at internet service provider level. ONLY IF WE LET IT HAPPEN.

Anyway I’m done ranting.

I racked up a few new sites but nothing that’s unique. I know I have the tools and experience, I guess I now understand how hard it is to come up with a good idea. I am still determined to prove that I can make some serious money online. I spent a few weeks on two different occasions in the UK this year and I realised how easy it is to sit down and watch crap on TV. Cause that’s what it is, mind rotting reality shows and fifteen minute adverts. A friend contacted me on Skype today that I haven’t spoken to since the start of this year. He asked me what “fun” have I been up to. To be honest this year I have just survived, can’t say it’s been bad but can’t say it’s been fun either. Last October I thought Classic Car Link was going to go big, especially after it hit a few newspapers. It gave me a great feeling for the whole month. I want that buzz again, a buzz of success. To achieve it I’ve got to work harder in my personal time, maybe I can’t do it on my own. If I can just find a few people that have a similar attitude and I could achieve it. One thing that really blew my mind this last month; Bingo. Again I made an assumption a few years back it was just a fad, turns out there is some serious money in it. Maybe I’ll create something early of next year. I got bored half way through writing this and opened up Photoshop, no I don’t own that domain I was just playing with designs.

Well that’s me clocking out for 2011, enjoy what’s left.

As you might know, I like to keep a record of what I’ve worked on over the years. So in no particular order below are some personal bits I’ve been working on:

www.BetCage.com

Bet Cage Logo

I’ve been a big fan of Mixed Martial Arts (mainly the UFC) for a few years now. I was also a big fan of the Pride era as well and there is a few of us that like to talk MMA when we go out. About a year ago I suggested we do a betting site with news articles. Earlier this month I finally got around to setting up the site. I’ve found two things very hard to do. The first is to compete with the other news sites and the second is to motivate myself to write the articles. There is a big difference between discussing who the better fighter over a beer to physically writing my opinion for an article especially when there is money involved. Especially when you feel like you’re talking to yourself, it’s not as fun as I thought it would be. I’m thinking of doing some video blogging against other MMA bloggers and some friends on YouTube. If and when I get round to doing it is another thing.

www.Nely.es

Well my brother came up with quite a few little bits he wanted doing. The first was creating a ring of sites, each consists of its own design, adverts and its own area of interest such as fashion, cosmetics etc. So I setup some basic sites, hosting, ads and no I don’t write the articles myself. The sites are:

www.Bellezahoy.es
www.Bolsoshoy.es
www.hogarhoy.es
www.modahoy.es
www.ropahoy.es
www.saludablehoy.es

On top of that I’ve been setting up some fliers in A3 and A5, business cards and adding some Christmas spirit to the site. Next week will be playing around with payment providers which probably won’t be fun but a good learning experience. So that’s me out for a couple of weeks and let’s see how the new job goes. CCL is plodding along; SEO is definitely not something I enjoy.

Anyway as usual if you want a sneak peak follow these instructions:

Load YouTube in your browser hit — Ctrl / Cmd + Shift + K in Firefox; Ctrl + Shift + J (Win) or Cmd + Alt + J (Mac) for Chrome — and add the following string of in console:

document.cookie=”VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=ST1Ti53r4fU”;

Close the console, reload the site and booyah you get the following (I should really get out more). I’ll be posting some personal updates soon I’ve been busy with work and a ton of new personal websites:

New YouTube Design