I’ve had a couple comments lately to my blog that I found interesting. I don’t get a lot of traffic OR comments most of the time, so I tend to scrutinize those that I DO get.
Anyway, in both cases I had someone leave what appeared at first to be a legitimate comment. Nothing long and complicated, but short, to the point, and actually related to my posting. Both comments were accompanied by URL’s and emails addresses, and seemed to be from college-age girls.
So, always curious to know about my visitors, and also wanting to return the favor and maybe comment on their blogs, I visited their sites. Neither was what I expected. Nothing really pornographic, but definitely enticing pictures. Both claimed to be new websites, and all the links on their main page went to an images.php file. Again curious, I clicked on the links. Instead of images, I was redirected to Fling, a singles site.
Now, I don’t have any complicated anti-spam methods on my blogs. I use a simple captcha to weed out most automated stuff, and I moderate everything to keep it clean and on-topic. And, both of these comments DID contain on-topic content. So, I’ve got to assume that a real person is taking the time to sit and do this. The question is, why? Is Fling doing this themselves as a way to draw traffic? Is Fling paying these people per click-through to run these sites and post comments on random sites?
Either way, it’s an interesting evolution in the marketplace.
As for the two comments that I’ve seen, I pull them up and strip out the URL’s and emails. I don’t want to be a jump site to Fling.
I’m gonna make this quick. This thing rules. I’m shocked that anyone was able to make something that so smoothly handles the obfuscation of the software/hardware interaction so as to make it possible to run WindowsXP within Ubuntu and vice versa. Truly a remarkable thing.
However, I can’t use mine right now, because I upgraded my VirtualBox Ubuntu package. Now I can launch XP, but it crashes when I try to log in.
I’ll let you know when I get it fixed.
I know someone “in the business”, so to speak, that pretty much refuses to do PC work. He’s sharp, he’s technical – there’s no doubt he could handle it if he put his mind to it – but he’d just rather not start. I can understand why. There have been so many different iterations of processor, socket type, memory, hard drive, drive controller, etc…. over the years that it can be a maze of information to sort through. If you don’t keep up with the industry, you’re suddenly left way behind.
For example, I wanted to upgrade the video in my kid’s computer. Games have gotten more complex, and the video was starting to lag. I had to spend several hours just researching video cards to make sure that I was at least buying something faster than what I already had. I wanted to boost the RAM in the PC as well, so I did a quick look at the motherboard specs – DDR SDRAM, 184-pin, blah…. Ordered a 1GB stick online, only to realize once it arrived that I had overlooked the “ECC” notation, that “ECC” ram would not work in my machine. Grr. I went back to the site where I bought the memory – half of the items didn’t mention ECC, which is probably how I overlooked it.
I guess it could be worse. We could still be running proprietary systems where the only way I could upgrade the video would be to buy a several-thousand-$ graphics card.
