Note: This column represents the opinions
of the writer and as such, is not purported as fact
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As a good web designer friend of my repeats with religous conviction - you
only get one chance to make a first impression.
It's unfortunate that one NZ discussion website didn't heed such sage advice
yesterday when they spammed a local usenet newsgroup with over a thousand
duplicated messages, each containing an advertising pitch.
The operator of the website concerned claims the postings were an accident
but not everyone is convinced. Even if it was unintentional, this
one event has effectively alienated a small but significant community
of Net users who were a perfect target audience for the site concerned.
It's a great shame when people with good intentions go off half-cocked
or have insufficient marketing or technical knowledge thus effectively destroying
a good part of their potential market through ignorance or incompetence -- but
it's something that just keeps happening time after time.
I wonder if the problem isn't the good old Kiwi attitude that we can turn
our hand to anything and don't need expert help, no matter how complicated
the problem or important the outcome.
Every now and then someone doesn't do their homework and tries to promote
a website using spam -- the interesting thing is that none of those
spamvertised websites ever seem to prosper. Anyone who did just a little
research therefore, would soon see that it's simply not a good idea
to use spam as a marketing tool.
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I mean, it's not as if it's particularly difficult or expensive to promote
your website using ethical and widely accepted methods and I've done my
best to assist those who want to do the job properly.
In the spirit of helping through education, I even emailed the website involved
in yesterday's fiasco to express my concern. To their credit, they replied to my email and advised
that the whole thing had been a terrible mistake.
Since I appreciate that mistakes do happen, I replied to their email with a long
list of suggestions as to how they might actively promote their site in
a more ethical and significantly more effective manner.
And guess what -- that email bounced.
Sigh -- there's no helping those who are too stupid to
even configure their email client properly I guess.
Suffice to say that I won't be mentioning the name or URL of the website
that was spamvertised yesterday because they don't deserve the traffic that
such a mention would provide.
How cool is this?
Like many Kiwis I often turn to the Net to get the latest weather forecast
and it seems that just about all the weather info seems to originate from
MetService despite the fact most sites repackage it a little.
However, if you live around Wellington, or are planning a trip there and want to know what
the weather's like then these websites are a must-have in your bookmark list:
This is not only a very cool use of Flash but provides some really interesting
realtime weather data.
Wouldn't it be nice if we had one of these for every city and town in the
country?
Video on Demand again
If the column I did a few days ago about video on demand got you all excited then
stay tuned, I may have sone exciting news in a week or so.
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