w e d n e s d a y , m a y 0 2 , 2 0 0 7

THE NAZIS ARE COMING

AND THEIR NAME IS "GOOGLE".

glad you made it. this is gonna be a bit long, I think, so dig in, eh? hmmmm. so, what's this all about? it's about absolute betrayal by blogger, who is now owned by google. yup. so, what's the beef? okay, let's start at the beginning. oddly enough, I recently posted on why I blog. here's the text from that post...


okay, so, yesterday, FlyinFox figured it to be a good idea to "tag" me to do a piece about blogging. specifically, "5 Reasons Why I Blog". I think this is what they call a "MeMe". okay, I'm game. suppose, though, we do a little legwork before we begin? first of all, I do not consider myself a true blogger. I write donald james simpson / unbalanced on a daily basis, and the approach is that of writing short entries to a photo-humor column. this ties in directly with reason #1, and said reason is posted in a disclaimer in the sidebar of my main page, which says, "donald james simpson / unbalanced 'heinous crimes against all of humanity' is a not-for-profit site, conceived to develop I.T. skills, and as a creative outlet. advertising is in exchange for free tools and / or services." quote, unquote. the fact of the matter is, I do this first and foremost as a learnig tool for IT and computer skills; and, to be perfectly frank, it works. I have abilities now I don't think I could have even imagined, say 3 years ago. so, anyway, when I started this site, I needed subject matter, so I decided to do humor posts, and the primary subject matter is (drum roll, please) the internet itself, usually poking fun at image searches, chain emails, chat forums... you know, the usual internet stuff, with a little bit of Socio-Political commentary on occasion, as well as some small doses of genuine blogging, frequently using photos of myself in odd situations or locations- having spent the last 3 years working for a nationwide consulting firm has afforded me ample opportunities for such photos. now, let me add this: that one reason alone is plenty enough for me to do this; that being said, I have found some other reasons why I continue, so here goes the rest of the list... 2) shock value. I have a very dry, sick and dark sense of humor. I write for me, and me alone; everybody else is welcome to come along for the ride, if they like. I always allow comments, as I've always loved the interaction involved with that; but, hey, where else do I get a free forum to post a graphic of a Pope-On-A-Rope Tampon, if not here? yup, shocking. by the way, I have had a personal report that my work on unbalanced has actually forced a woman to tears of horror. oh, the fucking humanity. 3) might as well chalk this up to vanity. I have on several occasions helped other bloggers with technical items, and I get a good deal of compliments on my site layout, which I've put countless hours of design work into. both of those scenarios pretty much give me a boner. 4) it is an immense challenge to come up with fresh material on a day-in, day-out basis. I am nearly constantly grabbing the funny, sick and unusual images I run across on the internet; said images go into a large cache, where most stay for awhile. some get filtered out to smaller caches for "feature" serial posts, or the Sunday Big Blog, which is a larger (and conceptualized) version of my daily posts. occasinally, they get deleted, but most get used over time. I also sometimes post photos or graphics that are emailed to me by readers. 5) growth. since I began unbalanced nearly 2 years ago, I have gone from a readership of 2 (including myself), to a core of regular readers of about 40-50, and semi-regular readers of about 80-100. I get a lot of hits from blogger.com, and the stats associated with my site are untouched. it has grown from a single page to a main page with 5 sub-pages: Doctor Chip's Psychotic Test Page (just that, mind you), Unbalanced Images (a cyber-photo gallery), Psychobabble (my essay page - you are here now), Abra-Cadaver (a Bravenet hosted site consisting of photos which may get me kicked off of blogger); also, there's a FAQs page, and I administer Infrastructure (a diary of a recording project, although temporarily on hold), and I have purchased my own webspace, where I have my own URL, and I primarily use that as a hosting ground for the file types that you can't get free storage on, at least of any significance as far as bandwidth. the Sunday Big Blog itself has it's own URL now, as it took too much bandwidth on my main page, otherwise. oh, did I mention I have my own Chat Room? no, I guess not. in fact, the Chat Room of Death has not yet been unveiled. or, did I just unveil it? yup, I did, methinks. okay, so to top this thing off, the icing on the cake, so to speak... ... here's my list of people I am tagging to do one of these, "5 Reasons Why I Blog".... Nigel St.John Regina Smegmatica Howle-Raines MargieMix Twit the Mohawk Chieftain RockDog Cyber-Legend CJ Sorg there you have it. ciao! B-) ------

all that said, I'd like to share a little secret with all of you at this time. we all do this because it gives us a voice, and all of us would like to be heard. me too. but, hey- what about traffic? can't be heard if nobody ever finds you. in reality, there's very little one can do to promote a web site, save word of mouth and advertising, and advertising costs money. suppose, though, that you stumble upon a way to advertise at no cost, except a bit of time and a little effort?

I found such a way.

so, here's the secret: once upon a time, through my tracking software, I happened upon a little-known section of blogger, a page they NEVER tell anyone about, called "Recently Updated". don't look for it anymore, google deleted it after they bought blogger from Pyra. anyhow, this page would have a running link list of all blogs updated in the last 10 minutes on blogspot.com. every one. so, I started to scroll down (mind you, the list was normally about 4,000 blogs listed as updated every 10 minutes!), and I noticed that there were a few pages that re-appeared every 2 to 9 or 10 seconds. all the way down the page. after some nosing around, I discovered that this was the "feeder" list for their main page "Recently Updated" link-scroll! holy fuckin' shit! so, I checked the scroll, and, sure enough, there were those sites, appearing every few seconds. remember your intro from blogger when you signed on? they tell you you can only have your site added to this list once every 24 hours. what a blatant lie. so, I nose around some more, and found that this list also feeds the "Next Blog" button in the navbar. oh, fuck ME, I gotta tap into this! after some experimentation, trial and error, and research, I found out how they did it. it seems that blogger sets a cookie of some kind when you publish. what I learned, though, is that you can publish repeatedly, and if the speed is right, BINGO! off you go into the land of increased traffic, thus defeating the cookie through the use of speed!

at that point, it was only a question of how many hits I was willing to spend time on. the rapid-fire publishing method generally netted me 10 to 20 hits per minute, so I'd spend maybe 45 minutes or an hour daily just doing this. just pushing the envelope. yup. fact is, my traffic was sometimes astounding. one Sunday, I went on & off most of the day, and got like 900 hits. the cool part, though, was that I tracked the stats associated with it. the traffic that counts- return traffic, or "readership" went up to the numbers stated above, at a steady increase.

I figure the worst thing that happens is that blogger spanks me, right?

... which brings me to the whole point of this post. blogger (google!) is now cracking down on this type of activity. they did something to completely disable the connection of unbalanced to the Recently Updated list and the Next Blog button- completely, mind you, so I don't even get the one publishing hit I'm supposed to be entitled to. well, they didn't contact me or anything, so, no big whoop. I just turned a couple of my sub-pages public, and did the little publishing thing with them, and to the same result. funny thing, though, they actually did me a huge favor, since I now was tracking those who linked to the main page! anyhow, this went on for a few weeks, I guess, and then, pfffffft. they take ALL my pages out of this list, even the ones I didn't pull this trick with. yeah, okay, there's more than one way to skin a cat, eh? so, I go back to surfing, and if I run across a site where it looks like they may like to visit me, I drop a comment with a link in it. blogger encourages it's users to do this.

as of yesterday (5-1-07) they disabled my ability to leave any links in my comments.

as of yesterday, they reduced my PageRank from 4 to zero.

a phone call directly to google proved useless, as they are a batch of cowards, afraid to be confronted by someone who takes issue to their Nazi-assed goose-steppeing mentality.

hey, I don't need any pity or sympathy, but these are the facts:

1) as far as I can tell, I did absolutely nothing to violate their terms of service. I dare anyone to show me in the terms of service where it says,"Thou shalt not publish rapidly in order to increase Traffic!". fact is fact- I found a loophole in the system they put together, and simply took advantage of it. nothing more, nothing less.

2) I shared this information with nobody. I did nothing to promote this activity to others.

3) I actively police my site in order to thwart illegal activities, racism and hatred.

4) this a non-profit site. fact is, I lose money on it, since I now pay for this web space. in reality, I truly enjoy doing this, and it's worth the money to own my own domain. where I can do as I damn well please.where I can write whatever I want to write.

where Nazis can't get to me or edit me. I posted this here so bloogle can't lay their greazy hands on what I have to say or share.

all that said, then, at the end of the day, I am officially announcing that I will be moving unbalanced to my own domain. I have already begun lifting all the old posts, and each one will be posted here as soon as I put software in place to host my own "blog". likely, it will take me a couple of months.

this domain is http://djs9961.com

-soon to be the permanent home of
donald james simpson / unbalanced.

thanks for stopping in. I hope it was a good read.



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