Yo, Newsweek and Technorati! Fans of your idea–I’m one–fear that the make-money-fast sleazes will ruin it through tag spam. That’s exactly what’s happening at this very moment.
The first eight or so of the posts under “ebooks” are in the vein of “Auction Explosion – How to turn your knowledge into mega profits!”
No, I’ll not do a link and add to the pathetic link count for the greedsters at getfreeebooks.com.
My favorite headline from the tag spammers is this: “6 Easy ways to gain an unfair advantage over your affiliate competition.” Or maybe unaffiliated sites. Look at the screenshot in tthe continuation of this post–and you’ll see a few familiar things.
Keep in mind that (1) the screenshot is not from the TeleRead blog, and (2) the getfreeebooks.com outfit created the domain just after I began using Technorati tags.
Notice? Getfreeebook.com is using the same WordPress template–a not-very-common one–as the TeleRead blog is. Coincidence? TeleRead’s version is customized, luckily, so there’s some difference, but I can’t help but wonder if getfreeebooks.com is trying to rip off some of TeleRead’s mindshare.
No, I won’t sue. It’s a template, for goodness sake. But considering getfreebooks.com’s ethics or lack thereof–in the exact use of the template–I will warn people to be very careful of the site’s offerings.
Is getfreeebooks.com collecting registrants’ names for spam purposes? Pirated books? Any spyware? I’ll let someone else test the zip files.
Any security mavens care to see what’s up and email me?
Rx for dealing with getfreeebooks.com
Meanwhile I hope that the good folks at Technorati will please think about guidelines and enough humans to enforce them. It’s fine for legitimate sites mentioning e-books to have lots of showings in “ebooks” and similar categories–that’s the idea. I’ll welcome company from, say, MobileRead or Pocket PC eBook Watch, Project Gutenberg, Distributed Proofreaders, Electric Forest, MaisonBisset, or the idiotprogrammer, the latter three of which are already there (in fact, one of the EF folks, Roger Sperberg, kindly suggested I use Technorati tags). But the hucksters are not welcome in the “ebook” neighborhood. Unless stopped or slowed, they and their ilk will ruin Technorati for the rest of us, and I would urge the company to act fast.
Getfreeebooks.com could just as well be pushing paper books for fellow greedsters. The medium counts less than the make-money-fast approach. Because of the greedsters, I use Feedster far less than before. I’d hate to stop using Technorati tags. I suggest that Technorati limit make-money-fast folks to “ebookscommercial” and similarly descriptive tags. Perhaps Technorati needs to encourage the formation of a Technorati users group if one doesn’t exist already. Or how about help from librarians?
Getfreeebooks.com’s whois info for Technorati
The best solution would be technical–to filter out getfreeebooks.com from the ebooks category. But if that won’t work, here’s contact info for a tag-abuse complaint:
Domain Name: GETFREEEBOOKS.COM
Registrant:
John Teh
John Teh (info@dead0eye.com)
No 3 Jalan Bunga Mawar 9
Taman Suria Jaya
Cheras
null,56000
MY
Tel. +6.0126706540
Creation Date: 24-May-2005
Expiration Date: 24-May-2006
Domain servers in listed order:
ns13.es2u.com
ns14.es2u.com
Administrative Contact:
John Teh
John Teh (info@dead0eye.com)
No 3 Jalan Bunga Mawar 9
Taman Suria Jaya
Cheras
null,56000
MY
Tel. +6.0126706540
Notice the creation date? May 24–just six days after TeleRead started using Technorati tags, including the one for ebooks?
Presumably Technorati folks will consider all these facts and avoid having crud like this clutter up the legitimate e-book-related sections of their site:
Related: Technorati’s beta version, via Boing Boing. Looks great!
