Dabitch.net - Everything is so random there must be a pattern

Wired wrote "when-the-spam-hits-the-blogs" about a nuisance called "referral marketing."

But search rank improvement or not, bloggers want referral marketers to leave their logs alone.

"It's not just that they somehow sneak into my weblog, it's that they are hitting my site so hard. One day there were more than a thousand hits from one single porn site," complained Åsk Wäppling, known to bloggers as "Dabitch."

Wäppling runs Adland, a blog on advertising.

"I did not put that site up to serve as some tag-board for cybermarketeers," Wäppling said. "It really irks me."

When they first realized their referral logs were being spammed, most bloggers wondered what the point of such a seemingly limited spam campaign could be.

But as several posts on discussion site Metafilter pointed out, the real target may be those automatically updated link lists on some bloggers' sites.

"They're trying to jump-start a meme," blogger Jerry Kindall said. "Rather than mailing (an advertisement) directly to people, they're sending it to the sites where people go to get cool new links."

Michelle Delio at Wired contacted me regarding the new phenomena of referral spam back in 2002, writing up "When the spam hits the blogs"

Some bloggers publish a list that automatically updates links to sites that have linked to them. So visitors to spammed blogs who explore the link lists also find those sites full of porn and sales pitches.

In most cases the link spam appears to have been added to logs by one of several companies that are selling a service they describe as "referral marketing."

Unsurprisingly, bloggers are not thrilled, even though they ruefully admit that the log spamming may falsely boost their ranking on some search engines.

Some search engines decide site ranking by factoring in the number of pages that link to a site. A site that's linked to heavily may appear among the first URLs returned in response to users searches.

But search rank improvement or not, bloggers want referral marketers to leave their logs alone.

"It's not just that they somehow sneak into my weblog, it's that they are hitting my site so hard. One day there were more than a thousand hits from one single porn site," complained Åsk Wäppling, known to bloggers as "Dabitch."

Wäppling runs Adland, a blog on advertising.

"I did not put that site up to serve as some tag-board for cybermarketeers," Wäppling said. "It really irks me."

where did it begin? acme complained and then acme the drama queen machine managed one of the worst crashes ever. disk two completly dead. disk one limping to its own slow demise as it could no longer rotate at proper speed. ram busted. fan busted. floppy drive busted. the busted etc/passwd taunting me. the single mode trick not working. the bad blocks spreading. I barely knew where to start. I took acme home in a cab that evening.

I needed more hardware. just the little bits so I borrowed Jake's lovely IBM keyboard, which makes that great keyboard sound with its giant keys, and his old puter. I dissected acme.
Got to work. One bad luck piece chain reacted after another. a smaller problem became bigger, and bigger. make a boot disk. pretty simple step. thats when the floppydrive dies. so i borrow a floppy drive. then i make a boot disk. then I need to train out to a warehouse to get another harddisk. at every turn a new problem. just constant bad luck. Is acme cursed?

it took way too long. thats all I have to say about it.
and i now need to replace;
        jake's motherboard
        jake's screencard
        .: one busted IBM 32 gig disk
        .: one busted fujitsu 6 gig disk
        .: two REG ECC DRAM
        .: CPU fan

or the whole damn machine whichever comes first. ;-) anyway - this ain't working.

I can't allow for that much downtime ever again.
bugger. this run and buy new things constantly is getting costly........ Spending this long on the phone to various hardware people who would replace it under warranty is getting ridiculous. I want a cheaper lease - i cant belive they dont replace broken hardware when im actually leasing! i want 12 hr response time on hardware faults. I want something better than this. much much better. throw in a videocard for good measure.

dear freelance god, give mama a job so she can buy herself a new machine. ;-)

Andreas (phpwizard.dk) has a genius idea late Saturday night - industrial-sized fan and a bilsvamp! acme is actually running in this state. See the green light on?
The wussy fan you see top right next to the floppy is not helping at all. We yank the floppy out, and the CD drive. and everything else while we are at it.

the CD drive makes a good operating table when connecting cables (red with yellow, right?). Lödkolv is my favourite tool.

This is the brand of car-sponge we used. In the danish recommended usage areas, it mentions nothing about servers.

"Ghost and scamads have had their own festival. It's called Ghost and will run for the first time on October 31 this year. But according to Adland, a magazine with the same name and concept already exists. A magazine that is produced in Brazil and first published in February this year.

One of the thinkers behind the Ghost Festival, James Lanham, editor of Prism: magazine, doesn't think it's a problem, since it's two very different things ...!

And not only that. Today, Marketing received a letter from a Danish company called "Ghost". The company makes 3D commercials and their logo resembles the Ghost festival's logo.

One can only conclude that for a festival that will promote new and unique creative ideas, they have shown, to say the least, even a little difficult to live up to their own concept!"

----pia

Challenge

In my office space, an odd former window looked like an empty sad frame.

Solution

I decided to paint Yuri Gagarin's portrait in it. With horizontal lines only, like you see in the old footage from his space orbit. And I began with his perfect teeth.

Result

My wall looked a lot better and my wall art skills won me a place to exhibit at Zona Tortona design week, Milan, Italy together with other talented and great designers, such as Jasper Morrison, who was the main attraction as he had designed a new ceramic watchface for Rado.

I wanted to create one of those velvet paintings, with blacklight colour and thought using my friend Yannakis as the subject would be fun.

I painted a portrait of my friend on thick velvet, using only three colours. The original velvet has unfortunately been lost in moves.

The free postcards available in Cafés all over Copenhagen sometimes have empty slots due to lack of advertisers. Cards based on seasonal and other themes are solicited from local artists.

Challenge

The free postcards available in Cafés all over Copenhagen sometimes have empty slots due to lack of advertisers. Cards based on seasonal and other themes are solicited from local artists.

Solution

Since birth & babies are one theme, I created an old school baby picture in an old-school pram, but with a cheeky message.