What these people do might not be technically illegal, but it’s certainly not ethical either. Say you buy a domain name for your business. Some time later you get a very official looking letter in the mail asking you to renew your domain name with DROA because it’s about to expire. They are counting on you not remembering what company you originally bought the domain from because it most likely wasn’t with DROA. Now say you renew with them. What you actually do is transfer your domain to their service, where you’ll now pay more for less features and bad customer service.

These guys gave us a great laugh here in the office. A lady called up saying she was from 411business.us and wanted to know if we wanted to renew our listing on that site. After much haggling, we finally got the price out of her: almost $500 for two years. She must have thought we don’t have an accountant because one quick look proved we’d never done business with them before. Ever.

Someone asked me yesterday about tracking site visitors and how to do it.  I’ve long been a proponent of using more than one analytics program, because what one misses the other may catch.  Knowing a lot of information about visitors can be very helpful.  I recommend at least using a statistics program provided by your host for free (and any good host provides this service in their control panel now) and Google Analytics.  That will give you a pretty good idea of what’s going on.

This scam is on my mind right now because I’ve gotten seven letters in the last few weeks urging me to renew my car warranty, and a friend received a phone call devoted to the same.  All they ask is for you to call and give your credit card and personal information and your warranty will be extended.

Problems:

1. The letters and calls don’t come from your dealer.
2. Your dealer probably doesn’t even have the option to extend anyway.
3. You’re about to get taken for some potentially serious cash for nothing.

After trying to free service Vidmetrix, I looked around for another service that wouldn’t fail when uploading videos to multiple sites.  I came across HeySpread.

HeySpread allows you to upload a video and choose from a list of sites you want to send the video to.  I paid $50 for 1,000 credits and each upload costs one credit per video site.  On my $50 I could upload happily for quite some time.

So I tried it out and successfully uploaded several videos to YouTube, Daily Motion, Metacafe, and Yahoo (there are more sites available, those are just the ones I chose).  The upload and distribution was successful and I was very pleased overall with that part.

Everybody is a blogger now it seems.  Blogs are great methods of maintaining communication and spreading truth.  They are also methods for showcasing some spectacular ethics failures.

As a quick for instance, my thoughts today are dedicated toward those who fancy themselves “journalists” or “public information gatherers.”  Sometimes people like this are extremely helpful and break stories the mainstream media won’t or can’t break.  They research a car dealer for example and find that the company purposely tinkers with engines to ensure frequent service appointments.  I am totally fine with that.  It’s the “activists” who don’t know what they’re doing that bother me.