The Deflation Of Self-Aggrandizement

[dr_phil_physics]

Occupational Hazard

Given that I have a university website, blogs, a nascent writing career and my own website, every now and then I Google myself. And brace myself for the crap.

At least my websites show up high in the searchlists, so that if anyone is every actually looking for me, they have a chance of finding me. After that, you have to beef up the stoic toughness, so you can find and read reviews of your work -- fortunately I'd seen all these before -- and other things.

But the crap pisses me off.

Lists of Lists

I wasn't surprised that I found my latest story, Le Grand Bazar at Space Westerns: (1) at its site, (2) on my blog, but also (3) sites which list the latest stories on various SF e-pubs. In fact, there were a lot of type (3).

Haven't decided if this is because people are helping people get to new stories, or whether they are copying and pasting from each other to show they are somehow connected to the industry. Doesn't really matter. It disseminates information, so it can't hurt.

Alphabet Soup Sites

In 1996 I had access to a UNIX PC at Hope College with a decent web browser and began to search for things to use in my physics work. With a 166 MHz Pentium at home and a decent FORTRAN compiler, I was doing a little of the Hartree-Fock computational work I'd done in grad school. And I was looking for some recent work on boron carbide. So I typed "boron carbide" into Alta Vista and... discovered that some rat bastards were creating websites with long laundry lists of things like chemical terms which were actually porn sites.

Yikes. I mean, you have to understand, I was looking for boron carbide! And this... this shit was in my way. Worse, having that show up on the screen in my office at a Christian college. It really pissed me off.

So I shouldn't really be surprised that people are still doing alphabet soup sites, except with a twist.

Business Linkies

Here's an example of non-porn alphabet soup crap:

Special Deal Ernest Wall Clock
Le Grand Bazar by Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon (SpaceWesterns.com) Six o?clock station time came awfully early for anything to be happening in Le Grand Bazar. ...
furnituresales.game-server.cc/special-deal-ernest-wall-clock.htm - Similar pages -

Yeah, my space station science fiction story is all about your bullshit wall clocks. Bastards.

The Big Question

Does anyone fall for this crap? Because I can't believe businesses would do this unless they actually made a sale from time to time? Buehler? Buehler?

Dr. Phil

Comments

[albogdan.livejournal.com]

Someone is getting paid by the page hit, not by the sell through. We lose time, the product's company loses money, and a web scammer pockets some cash for our inconvenience. Yeah, I hate those sites.

[dr-phil-physics.livejournal.com]

Exactly. It has nothing to do with either (a) my lovely story "Le Grand Bazar", which you really can read over at Space Westerns or (b) someone's crappy wall clock sales... or shirt sales (the word "shirt" also appears in my story and is liked to a "sales" site)... or presumably sock sales (since the word "socks" also appears).

So it pisses me off. And the sooner that businesses cotton on to the trouble their people... excuse me, their contract employees, is causing to clog up everything with uselessness, the better we'll all be.

Alas, it's as likely as the manufacturers of Viagra and Cialis actually giving a damn about the unlicensed spam selling of their products without a prescription.

Dr. Phil

[wendyb-09.livejournal.com]

Seems like folks are using the same search widget g-mail uses to suggest things that are mentioned in you emails. Which I've always thought was a little nosey.

And instead of clocks and furniture they could have been linking to bazaaro world as in freaky/weird...

And spammers think nothing of hijacking someone else's legitimate web address, like the Chicken & Waffle one we were talking about last week. Still shows up as a 'jacked viagra/cialis site.