The Sketchier Side of This Domain
A commenter on Scoble’s post complained about four of my sites, calling them spammy and auto-generated. Ignoring some of off-context commentary on me as a person, Matt wrote:
I wouldn’t blame Scoble that much, Elliot’s [sic] homepage links to a number of really spammy looking things:
vioxx.elliottback.com/ (that’s the worst)
msn-icons.elliottback.com/main.php
credit-card-information.elliottback.com/
celebrity-photos.elliottback.com/
He seems to be trying to automate the creation of a ton of content pages, take advantage of WP’s natural search engine advantage, and then use the trust from his domain (from the software he writes) to cash in via the really obnoxious adsense everywhere. Google seems to have indexed almost a million pages on his site. Probably not the type of content that Google wants their ads next to, though.
To address these concerns, I am about to give a breakdown of all the subdomains and properties I own into four categories: Respectable Blogs, Niche Blogs, Online Tools, and Automatic Experiments. You might be surprised by the breakdown–most of the websites that I am toying with are not automated in any way.
Respectable Blogs
These are hand-written, original blogs on a variety of topics. While you might not consider gossip and celebrity photos to be interesting to you, our editors do their best to populate them with interesting commentary and posts:
- Asia Blog
- Books Blog
- Business School Blog
- Eric Back’s Blog
- Gadgets Blog
- Elliott Back dot COM
- Video Games
Niche Blogs
These are blogs which I write content for, not because I love them, but to earn revenue. They cover topics I find interesting enough to create original content and share ideas for, but they are not my way of expressing myself. In other words, these blogs are just business.
- COMS 482 Notes
- Cornell University Blog
- Gold’s Gym Sucks
- The Gossip Rag Blog
- Hot Celebrity Photos
- University Tours
Online Tools
Every now and then, I get a crazy idea. I want to try something out–like a new platform for photo sharing via Gallery 2 (the MSN Icons site) or how to parse credit card information (the CC site). So, I build a site, plaster it with ads when I’m done, and see what comes of it. These are just fun projects for me, toys to play with. No one visits them, and I hardly make revenue off them.
Automatic Experiments
I have three ongoing experiments into automation. The first is WP-Autoblog, which I am using to syndicate posts from search engines on Vioxx, essentially turning my site into a meta-search engine on that topic. I’m using attributed excerpts to avoid any legal or ethical issues. The second project is Eye My Spam, a blog that goes straight from email to blog post without any filtering. Since no one uses the email address for communication with me, that blog essentially posts spam from my inbox straight to the web, useful for archival and public information sharing purposes. Now you can google a piece of email and see yes, it is indeed spam. The third project is the unreleased Infinite Tree project, which I’m still working on. Basically, it’s just an aggregator based around keywords.
Conclusion
I help this hopes you readers sort out exactly what I do–harmless dabbling, some serious blogging, and some for-profit stuff. I’m not interested in blog automation research that hurts anyone. My policy on internet techniques is not to be jealous of some one else’s software or business model, provided it falls within the law, but rather to be open to changes in the way people view the web. Is a syndicator dangerous? Yes. Does it provide a paradigm shift when used correctly? Yes. That’s why I wrote WP-Autoblog–to give people control over content and sourcing. It can be abused, but it can also be used to create useful directories of links, or create a meta-blog of blogs you manage.
Slammed by Scoble
Earlier today Robert Scoble wrote a post slamming for being a spammer:
Hey, Google AdSense team: Elliott Back is breaking your rules. He is reprinting my content (and, I’ve come to learn, other people’s content) without permission. He is spamming everyone’s trackbacks (to have my content show up in people’s blogs I link to, which drives traffic over to his Web site). He is causing damage to the Internet. Please remove Google’s ads from his page and remove the incentive to do this kind of stuff. I have NOT given him permission to reprint my stuff in whole. You’ll notice that this is a splog written by Elliott Back and you’re just helping him profit off of this kind of behavior.
You’re causing your advertisers brand damage by including your advertisements on this guy’s page. Thanks for listening!
Please let me know how you are going to handle this guy. A reputable company that says “do no evil” should immediately stop doing business with a slimeball like this. Thanks!
Unfortunately, the blog in question is using a syndication plugin I wrote for Wordpress, which as a side-effect includes attribution to my blog under the heading “software by Elliott Back.” It’s unreasonable to believe that someone would be confused as to the authorship by that, or that an internet-guru like Scoble would forget to do a WHOIS lookup. As a result of Scoble’s post, Adsense disabled my ads for part of the day, resulting in lost revenue and who knows what else. You would think they had measures in place to prevent this, but it appears not.
If anything, the lesson to be learned here is twofold: think and do your research before making severe moral or criminal accusations, and that the blogosphere A-list is too powerful. One person shouldn’t be able to bring down someone else’s revenue streams with a wave of their finger.
CP Linux / Unix Command
If you use linux, you undoubtably have encountered the command cp for copy sometime. Looking at its man page, it seems simple and easy to use:
CP(1) User Commands
NAME
cp - copy files and directories
SYNOPSIS
cp [OPTION]... SOURCE DEST
cp [OPTION]... SOURCE... DIRECTORY
cp [OPTION]... --target-directory=DIRECTORY SOURCE...
Generally this works well, except if you accidentally include a directory in the file list. Let’s set up a test environment:
-bash-3.00$ touch a b d e -bash-3.00$ mkdir c -bash-3.00$ mkdir ../dest
Now, what would you expect if I ran the command to copy all files in the current directory to the ../dest folder? Yes, failure, because c is a directory and not a file–it must be copied recursively or not at all. However, the cp command will simply skip over c and continue copying:
-bash-3.00$ cp * ../dest cp: omitting directory `c' -bash-3.00$ ls ../dest a b d e
This behavior is counterintuitive for me. I would expect it to first validate all of its input arguments, making sure that either a file is being copied to a new file name, a bunch of files to a directory, or some directories recursively to another directory. If these conditions were not met, I would not copy anything! A command which returns a non-zero value (error) should not perform actions on its input, unless it absolutely has to! Clearly cp could check its arguments for errors before processing them–so why doesn’t it, except historical reasons?