Life as I find it

I seem to be on a learning swing. Just back from the Group Relations Conference in Bangalore, and as I headed to my email, I saw that Cisco certification has a possibility for a review to be written. So I headed over to their site to take a look. No surprise so far.

What I found there was a relatively newish site with an eye for quality. This I admire. Further exploration led me to the learning center where the first article to cath my eye was one about soft-skills in IT managers. NOW, this is what I appreciate in an educational institution whether online or physical.

Just the last week, on an induction programme for young IT professionals in a leading organization in Mumbai, we had talked about how important it is to forget the competition orientation of education and learn to collaborate and achieve practical functionality.

The unfortunate fact of life is that people want to know what you know, and your own claim of competence is not an adequate measure in their eyes. So unless you are a mighty famous professional, it is important to have an idea of where your skills lie, build on them and get them officially acknowledged to certain standards to make them more visible and credible to those employers who have no clue of where your talents lie.

We had spoken of different ways to accredit and improve on this competence. In my opinion as both a consultant and an active webmaster, it is important to not just keep learning and updating our knowledge, but also to be able to apply it in a practical and functional way. One way of doing this is to step out of your comfort zone and take a risk to test your knowledge and get a stamp of acknowledgment.

The sorrow of much education today is that it doesn’t account for the human factor, which is what actually makes things work. To find a site that talks about soft skills while encouraging the certifications in various subjects makes me happy to be.

The online world is a good place to unfurl wings and chase development and growth in our chosen careers. This site is a useful tool for those.

The certifications themselves are well thought out and useful. In a world of competence, it is getting increasingly important to have skills verified and attested, which is exactly what this site helps you accomplish. Rather than duplicate the contents of that site to tell you everything about it, I invite you to actually experience it and perhaps you may want to share how you found it here.

I got this email:

Dear Administrator,

We inform you that your account is about to expire. It is strongly recommended to update it immediately. Update form is located here. However, failure to confirm your records may result in account suspension.

Confidential: Please be advised that the information contained in this email message, including all attached documents or files, is privileged and confidential and is intended only for the use of the individual or individuals addressed. Any other use, dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. This is the automated message. Please don’t reply. You tell me.

Talk of spam….. i don’t even know if I need to talk about this, except that it is sad that in this online world, it is so easy to defraus (or attempt to do so).

I had never heard of the company that sent me the email, forget buying something that needs updated subscriptions. Obviously a case of phishing or some get-rich-quick-illegally kind of thing.

I researched this message to see what experiences others had had and came across:

The write of this blog, some Ritesh Roshan has published it on his blog!!!

The description of this blog says:

“THIS BLOG IS CREATED TO EXPRESS THE FEELING & CURRENT RESEARCHES OF
SCIENCES. THESE EXPRESSION LEADS IN THE SPREAD OF KNOWLEDGE ABOUT
SCIENCE. THESE KNOWLEDGES HELP IN DIFERENT SCIENTIFIC DISCUSSION.
FURTHER, PRAYING FOR EVERY PERSONS WHO CLICK FOR MY PERSONAL BLOG AND
THOSE WHO DIDN’T CLICKED THIS FOR ANY REASON. YOUR’S FRIEND RITESH
ROSHAN”

Some exploration led me to:

For a moment, I thought that this was some student from Patna running a scam. Then I thought it must be some student who had been convinced to pass on a scam as a genuine message.

Then I looked at all the posts in the blog. The posts list looks like my spam box. All sex spam and scam. Yet, the description didn’t sound spammy.

Now I am wondering what happens when a spammer gers someones “email to blog” ID and runs it through a regular spam bot without the benifit of spam filters and stuff a normal email account would have.

And there are other people like this. Lazy to hunt for links at the moment, but there are plenty who create and abandon blogs and get careless with stuff like logins and blogging email IDs

For me, this post highlights two major concerns:

• What does it do to a person’s reputation if a spammer is running sex and scams in his name on his blog and what can be done to prevent it
• How are these scams still operating in a world of computerized banking and tracking of fraud?

Might be worthwhile making a preventative measures kind of post about this later.

I don’t know if this means anything, but I just noticed a strange pattern on my Adsense Report. For the last two and a half months, almost every tuesday, my adsebse earnings are zero.

For the rest of the days, its pretty much the same thing. I wonder what is going on out here. If anything, I would have expected them to drop at the weekends, but there is no clear pattern there. The only pattern is a noticeable drop on tuesdays.

I probably should have noticed it earlier, but I rarely check my AdSense account. It pretty much manages itself. So …. Even if I had noticed, I have no clue on why it is so, so I don’t know how I could have repaired it in any case. The only hunch I have is that perhaps some really repulsive ads show on tuesdays for some reason? I’m going to watch the ads and see if I can understand this phenomenon better.

Anyone have a clue on what is happening?

I’ve been able to flow from one work to another almost all my life. Curiosity got into me, temptation, the lure of quick money, desperation…. you name it, me done it.

Sometimes I wondered if I was some kind of a freak who was good at so many things, yet didn’t have lasting experience with anything and when I moved on, it was usually to something totally unrelared. The only pattern I saw was chaos, which reflected the chaos in my emotional life as well (born in an unhappy family, fostered with grandparents).

My jobs ran included (in approximate sequence) part time work with a cable TV service, running children’s camps, partner in a new layout design business, modelling, teaching English tutions, working on outdoor education/experiential learning programmes, instructing on Himalayan Adventure tours, working as a cook on treks, guiding treks, cultural tour hosting, pack horsewoman on treks, joyrides on horses, conducting surveys in remote villages, “home remedies and first aid” for local horses and dogs, transcripting interviews for documentaries, research for cocumentaries, film making, outdoor adventure training, facilitation on management training programmes, website design, SEO, content development, promotion, blogging……

A varied life…. and it still goes on…..

When I first learnt that a website could be created with a little effort, I remember my wonder - I had thought it to be an exotic and expensive thing, and yet, with a free host and an internet connection and some googled up tutorials, I could do it for free! It seemed impossible and impractical at that time. I had wanted one, and couldn’t afford any money, let alone the fancy quotes I got from designers.

Its been exactly 2 years and 7 months since my first website (which was largely white with some text on it), 13 revisions of my website, as I kept learning new things and stuff. I write on three blogs, run 7 websites (some for friends), earn enough from it to keep myself in necessities, and keep discovering new people, information and dimensions to the world.

This  category of posts - my journey - is a documentation of this strange, but satisfying journey of mine, that needed me to sweat blood, but rewards me just as intensely.

I came across this bizarre (yeah, that’s my favourite word) situation with poor Vlad, who like many of us here is a blogger writing about his interests and writing paid posts as opportunities arise. Now, this situation seems to have a lot of angles to it, but from what I basically understand….

This Vlad accepts to write a review about ePerks. From all that I have heard, this was a positive review (I can’t find it). However, comments on his post were very strongly negative. These had some intervention attempts by an anonymous commenter and the whole thing heated up.

Well… he addressed that exploding comments situation inviting an exploration into ePerks in a follow up post. The company itself did what ….. they shouldn’t have, if they valued their reputation. They threatened him. Now, for a company that buys reviews from bloggers to build thier reputation, to threaten a blogger for writing - and from what I hear, Vlad did not criticize the company until then - is like having an axe… don’t know where to put it… look…. there’s my foot…..

This is basically what happened. This was followed by an explosion of bloggers speaking up in support of Vlad (like I am doing right now). It really is no longer the issue what the services of ePerks are anymore. The issue now is their image. For a company paying to get reviewed, it sure has more unpaid reviews now, and none of them that they would want to pay for. I doubt if any of them include a link either. Some examples would be:

• iHype & ePerks - How To Kill A Startup by Andy Beard really looks into this situation from many angles. I found this post really helpful in understanding the situation.
• Presumed Guilty Until Proven Innocent by Aaron Walls speaks briefly about the right to free speech and the risk involved in mass acquiring of links without building relationships.
• Memo to ePerks.com: You idiots! Trying to censor a real estate weblogger is a poor way to defend your reputation — such as it is… by Greg Swann along with some other posts, all equally “defending” the right to free speech.
• There are many others who have got angry about this whole thing.

My perspectives on this:

• ePerks: This was an incredibly stupid thing to do, which I guess I don’t need to tell you by now. If you pay for a review, you get a review. The end. If you don’t like the comments, go camp out on the comments form, address the commenters (which you did). However, threatening a blogger for something he did not do….. You don’t have a leg to stand on. Opinions are opinions. The smart thing would have been to acknowledge the comments, apologize if anyone had suffered inconvenience, and invite them into a dialogue to resolve the issue, or make your stand clear. This could have got you a few free nice posts, for graceful handling. Now, it is just about digging yourself deeper and deeper, and the damage is really beyond control. How many bloggers can you sue? Do they even live within your reach to do that? Really, I see no happy solution for you beyond a massive apology, an attitude shift and big payments to bloggers for damage control.
• Vlad: I see you doing what you were supposed to be doing initially, but I wonder if you really understood the imact of your second post. While it certainly invited investigation and feedback, I felt that it enouraged making extreme stands, which is good to get lots of comments, but really, how important are comments - at what price?). Though I don’t see how it would have changed anything considering the nature of comments that followed.
• Common man: I understand your frustration at being scammed and applaud your sharing of your experience so that it may serve to warn possible victims, or provide feedback to ePerks, if they do attempt a change of attitude.
• The blogging community: I expereince this rush of support for Vlad as one of the strengths of this platform, and the community. I don’t know Vlad at all, but being in his situation (having written about a scam earlier) I know that it is a risk that we get unnecessarily caught up in legal hassles. While we know that there is something inside us that wants us to stand for the truth, it is equally difficult to face legal feed regardless of who will win eventually. I don’t know most of you personally, but this act of solidarity makes me feel that there is support anyway if we stand for our beliefs.
• For me: The truth needs to be told. If I can do it in a way that facilitates resolution, superb. If not, confrontation it is!