Testing Picasa2 and the FTP world??

Picasa 2.0 released

Probably the most significant ray of hope and light that I have seen in a long time from my trusted partner in blogging - Google. They finally managed to put out a new release of the free Picasa photo tool that I use to output my web pages of photos for my blog and web site. I can't wait to download Picasa 2 tonight and test it out all night long to see what new things I can do with the indexing and web output of my photo albums. I am hoping for the best and pretty darned excited about this new release. It also gives me hope that Blogger may finally add some new features if I wait her in feature limbo for long enough... features like utilities to display next and previous, blogrolling stuff, etc. I am confident it will all work out for the best.

I have a little theory about why these releases are planned as they are over at Google. They are spreading updates to their desktop software packages and non-search utilities to maximize PR coverage. By putting out one release at a time they can focus their PR efforts and search traffic generation to make the launch successful and avoid having too many items to promote at once. Thus they can't promote blogger updates until after they have milked the Picasa upgrade which they didn't hype until the Google Desktop Search beta was starting to lose steam as news.

Strange referrers

I have been getting strange referrers to my blog lately. Netfirms has pretty bad stats but it does provide links to the referrers that link to your site. As a marketing guy I generally like to think that I can find some insight into my world by looking at who links to me. So I followed the links from a number of sites that have been sending me traffic in the two or three clicks. I also should note that this is the main source of referrals. Only one other site seems to link to my site which is http://worldgineer.blogspot.com/ someone who I met while posting some odd ideas to halfbakery.com. Anyways... these referring URLs all go to the same sort of pages. Here are some of the URLs.

http://www.jfcadvocacy.net/
http://www.hdic.org/
http://www.hasslerenterprises.net/
http://www.darkangelclan.com/
http://www.devilofnights.net/

If you look at each of these sites they all have the same style of a site that has been shut down. The message at the top of these pages all say some variant of "The entire set is permanently under terms of service violation - Due to miss-proper use of the hosting account". But more of these sites keep referring to my blog. So I looked up the person responsible for the domains through whois. The pattern is thus far consistent.

Domain Name: DARKANGELCLAN.COM
Registrant: Jane Phill 61 Street New York NYC US 10044

Administrative Contact: Justine, Rianna (NIC-18209) contact69@support-4u.net Rianna Justine Lexington Ln. 71 Bronson South Dakota , US 85703
Phone: 8850462774

I also noticed that some of the links like http://www.flafeber.com/ go to an online casino site at http://casino.4host.uk.com. So I looked around this site to see what I could find on it. I did find a page where you register to link to them that is powered by a tool called Link Swapper 1.5b. I checked this out in a search and all that comes up are spammer type sites for diet pills, viagra, etc. so I have to figure there is some technology used by these blog spammers in common. The solution is to not follow the links from referrers but they do screw-up traffic statistics.

Now I have some information the next step is to see what else I can figure out about these ghost referrers. I suspect there is some form of scam, worm, virus, something involved where these folks are trying to take advantage of blogging to get sites promoted but I can't figure out how or what they are doing just yet.

Don't drink and blog

It is difficult to avoid causing trouble in a personal blog when you write about your friends and things that they say. I have recently gotten into some trouble by writing some items that a few months later were deemed to be private and personal once they had been pointed out to the person who they were from. So I received messages from them saying that people were very hurt that I revealed secrets and that I betrayed their trust. This was never my intent and I immediately edited content that was brought to my attention as problematic.

While I think I pay attention to keeping secrets secret I am not a good enough judge. What I need to always think about when publishing an item publicly is that once it becomes public it is available to anyone. One way to avoid this is to make all content come from an anonymous source which is so radically opposite from sharing thoughts and opinions with friends and seems unstable because it requires complete secrecy to prevent the whole endeavor from imploding.

So for now I will try harder to refine my filters for not telling personal secrets or damaging information and when I have something interesting and secret I will just put it into the queue for a tidbit to include in a piece of fiction. I will need to maintain that the blog is more about impressions than reality.

I've discussed how to filter content for blogs with friends who are musicians and artists as they have a trickier road than I do because they are dependent upon their popularity and also operate in a politically sensitive world of local music where you can't anger radio hosts, museums, club owners, or other artists because they can effect your radio play, sales, and bookings. So while they may have interesting entries to post they can't just post them online. I'd imagine that this is a common challenge for people now. They have to evaluate privacy, politics, and risk now that the barriers for publishing have been demolished by technology.

Little incidents that almost got bigger make me imagine that there must be a brewing storm of blog lawsuits that are going to start soon with people losing their jobs due to blog entries, libel, slander, etc. The folks who have been in news professionally their whole lives and have dealt with some of these probably are glad to see everyone else saddled with their headaches. Unfortunately as a member of everyone else I never took the required ethics course in journalism school.