blog

I know this is slightly off topic, but I thought it was interesting since we are all internet marketers and therefore we use your keyboards often.

I just read a news article where it claimed that some keyboards are 'dirtier than a toilet'. It only tested a small sample of keyboards (33 keyboards in total) with some deadly results - 4 of the keyboards were seen as being a potential health hazard, and 1 keyboard had 5 times more germs than what is normally found on a toilet seat!

I think I'll start to request the cleaners to clean my keyboard regularly

On the weekend I signed up to HostICan as I was looking for a new web host. The reason why I signed up with them is because their prices were low, they had a money back guarantee, and they said that they have a 24/7 Live Chat service. So that all sounded good to me.

However yesterday I had trouble with the hosting and I finally managed to find the Live Help button - although they claim to have 24/7 live help service, if you look carefully it states that if the live chat button isn't there, then it means that their offices are closed, and tells you to try during their office hours.

Any way, I finally managed to get through to HostICan's 'support' service after refreshing the page a few times, and all I can say is that their support totally sucks. Support my foot! The first time they actually terminated my conversation - I do use Live Chat at work so I thought maybe the person accidentally pressed to end the chat.

So I went back and tried to use the Live Chat service again. Fortunately, this time someone responded to my request and we had a very brief conversation. In the end, the HostICan Representative told me she couldn't help me as she was not authorised to provide further help. I asked whether there were any Tech's around that could help me as it was very urgent and she said she wasn't authorised to get them to help me although there are Tech's in their office 24/7.

I told her that was ridiculous and couldn't she ask her Supervisor to give her permission to get one of the Tech's over to help me for just a few minutes. The HostICan representative then proceeded to give me a canned farewell response! That's right - they didn't even bother saying, "I'm sorry, my Supervisor isn't available" or something like that, which I could have understood - she just went straight to the farewell.

I ended up emailing support in the end for their help, and hoped that their Tech Staff were much more friendlier. They weren't. They told me to do something which I had informed them I was unable to do. I know it wasn't a canned response because they had misspelled something. Honestly, do they even read their customers emails?

All I can say is that I'm glad HostICan(t) have a money back guarantee as I will absolutely be using that. The lack of customer service is just astounding.

It's not technically an illegal scam, but I think it's a legal scam - which is really sad.

I went to a seminar and they had a little segment on internet marketing. So, being in this industry I was really intrigued. But the more the presenter gave his speech, the more I became disillusioned and wanted to yell out not to buy his products. His product is basically to teach people how to use Blogger to make money, and he and his company provides support for it. The examples he gave were of those pay per post type schemes. The product costs a few thousand dollars to be part of it.

Sometimes I wish those kinds of people who give internet marketing a bad name would just go away. People don't need to be ripped off, they are there to get some real help for their business!

On Sunday night, I went out with a friend and two of her friends and for some reason we ended up talking about online social networks. My friend said that she's not on Facebook and doesn't see the need to as Friendster already has all the things that Facebook has like applications and stuff.

The girl sitting next to me was telling me that she has accounts on both Friendster and Facebook, but uses them for entirely different reasons. She sees Facebook as more formal, to see who is friends with whom. She uses Friendster for all her friends and other random contacts, and puts up photos of herself and her friends at parties and other things. Apparently she is friends with Government Minister's kids, so they think that Friendster is more safe than Facebook to put photos they don't want to be found on the internet.

I just wonder how many other people keep their lives 'separate' on the different social networks that aren't specifically eg for making business contacts like LinkedIn. Is this a common phenomenon?

We just got our first spammer on Gooruze. This person has now been deleted off the Gooruze system and hopefully won't return again.

For those who aren't sure what steps to take when this kind of things happen, please go to their member page. You can do this by either searching for their name under the members page list, or by going directly to their page - eg http://www.gooruze.com/members/angieh

When their profile page loads up, on the right hand side underneath their display picture, you should read something which reads "report" which is next to a red button with an exclamation mark in it. Press on "report" and enter the reason why you are reporting him or her.

This 'member' will then be put in the queue for moderation where we will either keep them in or kick them out, depending on what they have done.

ps-thanks to those who also removed our other spammer who spammed a bunch of articles, Q&A, and some news. Good job!