URLs du Jour

2009-06-25

  • You might be amused at the chutzpah of news5alert.com, which looks like a news site, but … well, here are the first couple paragraphs of their "news story":
    Are online jobs the next big thing? For Mary Steadman it sure is. Mary, a mother from Durham, NH is thriving, in the middle of an economic recession working in the comfort of her own home.

    From her website: "I get paid about $25 for every link I post on Google and I get paid every week... I make around $15,500 a month right now"

    Well, it says "Durham, NH" for me. But when you click, you'll find that "Mary Steadman" almost certainly lives closer to your own home. And the whole page is full of links going to the same stupid scam: buy our package that will tell you "how to make money posting links online."

    Wired has a good article about fake news sites, and how their links appear in even reputable web publications. (Well, … Huffington Post.)

    I don't keep close track of what's going on over there in the Google ad box. My apologies if it gets invaded by this sleaziness.

  • Since I bitched and moaned about it: the invitation for Iranian diplomats to attend Independence Day picnics at American embassies has been revoked.

  • And I've pretty much given up on writing to my Congresswoman/Toothache, Carol Shea-Porter, but after you read about the Waxman-Markey Cap-n-Trade bill, you might want to try importuning your own congresscritter to vote against.