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Where You Stand
By peace | July 6, 2007
Which do you want to be — a follower or a person who see fire and pour kerosene onto the fire, or a person who try to cease fire, or do you put fire?
My story about the donkey, the boy and the man. The man riding on the donkey but cursing all the shits (SLTopsites Woes) that the donkey had done. Not happy about the donkey, discard the donkey, release the donkey, free it. Don’t hurt the donkey. Don’t you know how to protect our world, our nature, our own neighbour even?
Quoted From Dolmere Talamasca:
Rambling About and Around That Top Sites Page
(http://www.lovelymachine.com/Dolmere/2007/07/rambling_about_and_around_that_top_sites_page.html)
I do quite agree that the “SL-blog-thing should not be a ‘popularity contest’”. It’s a community and in my opinion everyone has something interesting to contribute.
That means you are not sure of where you stand. You are FOLLOWING the crowds. People do something you must follow. You see fire, you pour fuel to the fire.
Giving out money, the site owner’s way of doing things, might not sound nice. To me its like money can buy anything? But think of it in another way, it could work. Nobody is doing it. Why can’t he try? Just because no one is doing it does not mean that he cannot do it. In business, you have to be unique. Be the first odd one out. Be ingenious. You got to have courage and guts. So what then is interesting to you? Why do you join and why do you still ‘pasting’ the blue little sticker or logo with a ranking of 33 on your webpage?
You are very contradictory to what you are doing.
I also agree with Vint that content is king. One thing the top site is not, for sure, is a content tool. It links to sites with similar interests only (SL)- other than the target site’s title and short description there is no way for the browser to distinguish the differences.
Obviously you do not understand what is called speciality. The website focus on Second Life websites. It is meant to list all the second life websites there. Whoever is interested in visiting websites about Second Life can find easy access to it. If you are not sure of what you are doing, why do you join in the first place? If everything is reveal in his site(sltopsites), would anyone want to click to your site? That would defeat the purpose of placing your link at sltopsites and not increasing traffic too.
I joined the top sites web page right after I first heard about it in-world. At the time the IM didn’t seem “spammy” as much as informative.
1. After joining there have been several moments where I’ve felt a pang of regret: When I noticed the same informative message showing up on my blog comment flagged as the spam that it turns out to be.
2. When I noticed the same comment spam arriving in other bloggers’s published comments. Have I mentioned I dislike comment spam?
3. It wasn’t until after a number of sites had joined up and some rankings were appearing that the google adsense adverts appeared on the site. This was a red flag for me. I wholeheartedly agree that posting ads there – an prominent ones – is abusive.
See his webpage: rank 33, sltopsite button in light blue, google ads in dark blue. A picture says thousand words. See for yourself.
Vint says that the site owner only wants referral traffic to his own top sites web page as a means of generating traffic for his own google ads. I SO agree that this is the intent and I did not like the way the ads snuck onto the page AFTER the fact. The sneaky appearance of google ads alone might be enough to deter me from keeping the referral code on my pages. However, as I said earlier, at the moment this site is generating new traffic for me. If that traffic stalls or stops I’ll reconsider the usefulness of being involved.
This is what I call cursing the donkey when riding the donkey. This is the type of person where the chinese says cross the river and destroy the bridge. He may not have cross the river. He is on the bridge now. If he does not like the bridge, he can leave it alone, other people can use it. There are more people in this world. There are people who like the bridge, not just a few minority of people.
Anther off topic off topic bit coming here – but you know that I kinda rant along a stream here in my blog. I look at my own adsense adverts here on this blog page as a simple means of accepting tips. You see with the pennies that come in from a few clicks I equate a few simple clicks on my ads to dropping a few hundred lindens on me in-world. It’s a win-win situation. I can get a few cents and you send me linden tips without losing lindens 
People do adsense is wrong, he do adsense is logical. Come on, show me who is not working in this world. Who do not need money. Where on earth did sltopsite say that you have to click on the ads. Did sltopsite go to anyone to beg for money? Did sltopsite says you must link to him? Did sltopsite says you must list your site and click his ads? Don’t tell me you do not want people to click on your ads? Then why do you put ads on your page? What harm does it do to any people? Ads are information. It is a way of telling people, spreading words, promoting business. Tell me how you know Federal Express, how you know Google Adsense if there is no advertisement? Generalisation must be made in justice. Please do not any how generalise.
Vint’s point about privacy I can agree with: “No disclaimer on his site concerning privacy. What will he do with your e-mail address? And what with all the other data he gathers through the visitor tracking script?” I would like to see answers to these questions too.
Why do you wait till people say then you say? And after you had agree with Vint, you are still holding back to the light blue sltopsite button and the dark blue, google adsense. Does it mean that every website that you go you must ask them all these questions? If you are so perplexed and perturbed by this sltopsite, why join and made yourself unhappy? Just leave quietly. You want to share all these, share in your own group. There is no need to hurt the feeling of other people, especially the donkey you are riding on. This is inhuman animal torture.
Oops – that scared me. Popups! If this site has popups I’m out! I turned off my popup blocker and headed for the top site page. Nope, no popups. Lordfly was just using this as an example of where else the open source php code that runs this page is used. It’s a valid argument – sleazy people use it so it must be bad. To go to the extreme I’ll play devil’s advocate and mention that sleazy people use Second Life, VHS tapes, DVDs and many open source tools including apache – that must invalidate them all, right?
Lordfly continues: “It’s basically a self-feedback loop; all of the sites link to each other, boosting up their own stats.”
Is there any wrong in doing so? Whose website? You want sltopsite to link to your site? You want any business website to link to everyone in the world? You have to be fair to everybody. Don’t follow what people say blindly. Pop up have or don’t have. When you sign up, you already check that out. Whatever added on or not, you know too.
Oh, Lordfly also asserts: “They don’t really boost your traffic… so unless you’re willing to go to some sleazy lengths to get your banner to #1 (ie bribing), don’t bother.” As mentioned above my google analytics account disagrees with this statement. Perhaps others are not seeing a boost in traffic from being listed there and if so I’d recommend bailing given the other negatives. Like I said – when the traffic stalls or dies I’ll be pretty quick to edit my templates.
Might we put to bed the idea that the #1 site is always the same, manipulated and the site owner’s own? This comment has shown up in a few places so far and I’m not sure where the idea came from. Right now In/Out and Pagerank #1 are all different and none of them are the land developer’s site. Further, the “winner” of the lindens (this twist was new to me, I was unaware there was to be any payout – especially when my site was #1 by pageviews for a while before incoming clicks became the default view) was Looker Lumet this past round, not the site owner.
We can, however, grumble that the site shows google pagerank but does not offer an option to view by pagerank listing instead. A lot of good a pagerank listing would do me though – my blog appears to be hosted on a case sensitive file system and the google pagerank code on the top sites page lowercases the URL before checking, so my site shows as a 0 rank regardless. Whereas a site that does not lowercase my URL shows a google pagerank of 4 out of 10. Go figure.
Visit all the different directories listing. See which website do not have google ads. Go see which directories have so many features as you said. Want to ride on donkey and say the donkey got too much fur, want to say the donkey got got short legs, then go and find a horse. Not happy just come down, don’t need to hurt people.
What good do you gain for doing all these things? Probably you will increase traffic as a result for producing ‘juicy’ news. Is it very glamourous, at the expense of other people? You may be more fortunate than other people around you. Look at people in the third world countries. They have no time nor so much energy to gossip. Do you see only the bad points of other people or the websites in particular?
Give people a chance to grow and to learn from their mistakes. There are so many people doing these. But I never do that. Spend your time doing more productive things. Words can hurt and words can kill. Words can heal and words can motivate. Why choose the former and not the latter? Do you feel good for doing all these? Are you happy? What is your principle in life? Do you know what you really want and who you really are? Do you don’t have your own principles and conscience? When you see fire, you add more fuel to it or do you try to cease the fire? Are you helping the world to be a better place to live in? Creating peace or provoking peace?
Topics: All Posts, Motivation | 1 Comment »
March 22nd, 2008 at 9:29 am
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