Payoneer and Clickbank

It's been almost a year since ClickBank affiliate network has proudly announced that would start a collaboration with payoneer. It has too long, and many CB affiliates suffer from it! Clickbank follow their own announcement and make it happen. It can help us affiliates and can help clickbank in attracting a far broader audience.

Are children nowadays smarter

I have been hearing a few opposite opinions in regards to the intelligence of todlers and children nowadays. Some researches claim that the quick penetration of technology has made children smarter as there's much more information accessible for them, whilst other claim that automation of some processes makes various parts of the brain numb.

I personally think both are right. The humankind is ever-eveloving. The men of today, in the western world, has no need for certain skills that previous generations have wielded. So, the adaptive human brain makes room and leaves one aptitude out in order to improve others.

Today's children aren't more , or less intelligent, they are just different.

Did facebook take Muybarak down?

I heard some opinions (this is a selection of a few) about what was the role of Facebook in the latest happenings in Egypt. I think the internet as a whole allowed people to communicate and they have done so priorly to the Facebook times. Sure Facebook was the tool but I am certain forums and local sites written in Arabic could claim to have at least the same affect.

Twitter to warn professional athletes

CNN says Twitter has recently sent out a warning toward professional EPN athletes. That's a rather self-righteous and somewhat overly P.C as far as I see it. It's an internal UK football organization thing and nothing to do with Twitter. People mock others everyday and no one else gets warned.

UK Law firm tries to extort random internet users

It has been reported that a UK law firm has sent a mass email to internet users claiming they will "sue them" for downloading pornographic content. I was pretty shocked when I read this news:
a. Thinking pornography is completely legit.
b. Amazed that some UK firm has the nerve to extort innocent people, who are most likely porn users like most of the adults on this planet, and probably don't want the whole neighborhood to hear about that.

I would say this is one of the harshest forms of extortion. These people should sit in jail for a long time.

The JCpenny incident - NYtimes and Google harm JCpenny

The NYtimes published an article about unethical methods of SEO (search engine optimization) and basically called out JCPenny who used such methods.

First off, as an expert in the web marketing industry I have to say: most sites use such methods to increase their visibility. This is nothing unusual, really.

The fact NYTimes decided to call out JCPenny and practically force Google to react seems a bit odd to me. They could have chosen almost any other website on the internet and show it does correlate with Google's webmaster guidance, but they chose JCPenny and even monitored how Google will harm them as a response to the article that was submitted to the head of the spam team Matt Cutts.

My bet is that they hold a secret interest to do so.The big retail stores that compete with JCPenny have probably earned millions just in the last months since JC dropped in ranks. Like always - in business, no one does anyone favors for free.

Is Google buying twitter?

Numerous people that hang around the webmaster world forum have claim that Google is currently "sniffing around" to see if Twitter is up for purchase.

After Orkut has miserably failed (you might have not even heard about it being Google's social network) - they now aim at the world 2nd largest social network and one of the top 5 trafficked sites in the world. This makes perfect sense to me and I concur it would be a wise move upon Google's business development team.

The problem with such move is that Google would integrate social signals from Twitter into the search results, i.e: twits mentioning websites will be counted as links and improve a website's visibility. That is currently being practiced already by Google to some extent, but when they gather the full data from Twitter, results will be changed dramatically. Millions of website owners who have not been focusing on Social media effort will have their assets harmed, at least to some extent, and even if they were doing some Facebook promotions - it will not be credited as much as twitter. That could and should cause an immigration from the love-able and much better Facebook towards dull, uninteresting, Twitter.

harassment is no joke

Two days ago I heard a story that kept me up all night. A friend's of mine daughter opened her Facebook account, at the whooping age of 7, and added her classmates and family there. So far so good. It has vastly improved her reading skills and her parents were very pleased she uses the internet for something bit more advanced than "create your online Barbi" apps. After a few days in, she received a message from an adult whom she doesn't know who started interrogating her and trying to acquire some details off of her (these were not disturbing questions in the sexual sense of the word, but still - make you suspect what this 30 year old adult has to do with her).

Her dad called me, the online wise and I referred him to Online reverse trace.info - where you can find someone's details and phone # with a simple search (it involved a few dollars to register there, nothing too expensive when it comes to your daughter's protection anyhow). He found the person, who was foolishly using his real name, and called him by phone - facing him with what he just found. Needless to say, the person had no good explanation, and he was so terrified that he promptly removed her off of his friends list. Problem solved but this still scares the hell outta me.

The Nigerian scam

This is an open question for the readers - how many of you had a supposed or even several supposed rich Nigerian uncles who inherited all of their belongings to you, a person whom they never met or shouldn't have any blood connection too.

Wise people would assume something is awfully wrong with such scenario and would dump it straight into their junk box, but some people, I can assume elders and perhaps people who just break into the virtual world. ScamBusters is a really great site and has written a very good piece about it. You'd be surprised to know how many people fell into this scam.

Anti Protester.