Web Hosting Info

Over the last few months, I’ve been battling spam on a forum I own. Tried everything from captcha, require new users to validate their emails and I still got loads of spam.

I headed over to vBulletin.org to find a good plugin and found this. It uses your Akismet API key to filter certain usergroups posts. Akismet has worked really well on this (Akismet has caught 23,837 spam for me since I first installed it.) and a few other blogs that I own so i thought i’d check it out.

Hopefully this will be the end of spam

They subject of Net Neutrality has intensified in the last few months. I found this post a few weeks ago and found it interesting. The post explains what Net Neutrality is and how it affects a wide range of people who use the internet daily.
Basically, if the phone companies get their way, ISPs will be able to choose which Search Engine you use.

For example, let’s say that Comcast creates a search engine (intending to set up a system like Adwords), if Net Neutrality is not protected, it could (in theroy) slow down (or remove access) to major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! or MSN. SEO’ers would now have the job optimizing sites for the Comcast search engine which would gain a significant market share due to Comcast customers experienceing slow loading times to other engines. This could happen to ISPs all over the net.

Other examples of how ISPs could intervene is on wikipedia;
In 2004, North Carolina ISP Madison River blocked their DSL customers from using any rival Web-based phone service.
In 2005, Canada’s telephone giant Telus blocked customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to the Telecommunications Workers Union during a contentious labor dispute.

Net Neutrality is a great thing and should be protected, I hope that readers in the US will call their senator asking them to vote in favour of Net Neutrality.

• Save the Internet (Find out which senators are against Net Neutrality and also a detailed explanation to what it is).
• Digg (Search for Net Neutrality to see many news items with discussion)

Link Worth Calculator – Text Link Ads

After reading about this tool on ProBlogger I decided to try it out. This is a good tool to calculate how much a link from your site is worth. I had a go and it returned some good results. I had a go with www.bbc.co.uk and it returned some amusing comments “More than you can afford”

The calculator takes the following into account;

Traffic of your website
Link popularity of your website
Theme of your website
Number of links to be sold
Sitewide or single page placement
Location on the page

Source

The image of “the area on your site where you will place the text link ads” looks remarkable similar to the adsense “heat” image. It looks like most companies agree that directly above/below/next to is the place to get best results from ads.

Link Worth Calculator