Newsbites

Two sides of Email: the nasty and the pleasant…

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Today, I got two rather different emails. I’ll include them both. In both of them, the similarities are quite obvious: mostly they are both likely automatically generated, and sent to hundreds or thousands of recipients.

The pleasant (Ad network name changed):

Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank you for applying to join the **** Advertisement Network. We have reviewed https://www.investorblogger.com and appreciate the time and effort you have invested to create a quality environment for your visitors. However, we are unable to approve your site as a publisher on our network at this time. We very much appreciate your interest in our company and wish you best of luck in your endeavors.

Sincerely,

***

Nicely done, thanks, guys. I’d like to be refused like that more often, wouldn’t you?

The nasty (posted as received, minus address): 

THE COCA COLA COMPANY, etc.

THE COCA COLA COMPANY OFFICIAL PRIZE NOTIFICATION

We are pleased to inform you of the result of the just concluded annualfinal draws held on
(25th of January 2007)  by Coca-Cola in conjunction with the British American Tobacco Worldwide Promotion.Your email  was among the 20 Lucky winners who won £1000,000.00{One million Great Britain Pounds} each in the THE COCA\COLA COMPANY 2007 PROMO.
However the results were released today 30th of January 2007 and  your email was attached to ticket number (7PWYZ2007) and ballot number (BT:12052007/20)
The online draws was conducted by a random selection of email addresses from an exclusive list of 29,031,643 E-mail addresses of individuals and corporate bodies picked by an advanced automated random computer search from the internet.
To begin the claim  processing of your prize you are to contact the fiduciary agent as stated below:

Mr William Carpenter
22 Garden Close, Stamford,
Lincs,PE9 2YP,London
United Kingdom.
Email:winning_claimsagent001@yahoo.co.uk

The second one is so obviously fake, I can’t believe any one would fall for it. The spelling, punctuation, formatting (careless), and the Yahoo! email address. Just totally tacky.

Insurance needn’t be a nightmare, if you keep your cool!

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Insurance is something we rarely spend that much time thinking about. I know that I only thought about my car insurance once in the last 365 days, and that was when I got a much bigger quote for a 2 year old car than I had expected.
It was naturally a big surprise since I hadn’t had any motoring convictions ever, had a full license, nor had ever reported an accident. Like I said, my car had even depreciated in value, but the premium of the insured value had actually increased. Made no sense to me.
So naturally, we looked at other ways to cut the premiums back. We ended up with a much lower quote, because we determined exactly what we needed, item by item. Though we stayed with the same agent and company, the detailed approach we used helped us to cut our insurance premiums a great deal.
With the detailed quotes from ASDA Home Insurance and Car Insurance, you can really find out what your insurance quote will be, BEFORE you pay a penny.

This post has been insured by ASDA Home Insurance and Car Insurance.

Google Page Rank: Ups and downs…

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Google regularly updates its page rank every quarter or so. So naturally, any changes are anticipated widely by bloggers all over the world! But things change, and so does a PR Rank!? Did you check yours recently?

Well, I hadn’t checked my stats for a while. I checked today in the Google Toolbar, and noted that my blog had dropped from a ‘5’ to a ‘4’. Naturally, I was disappointed, because I had come to expect my ‘5’ as a kind of right. This change highlighted how dynamic PR rank actually is. In other words, bloggers need to continue working on their blogs, linking, commenting, and promoting their blog in little ways and, sometimes, in bigger ways.

Actually, my blog fell, because I actually hived off a large part of my blog in early August, but the PR ranking remained at 5, while Google’s search engines kept reporting 404’s on many pages. That issue slowly resolved itself as Google’s search engines crawled my site. Unfortunately, the site to which the majority of my blog moved has remained uncrawled for sometime, and still doesn’t show up properly. I think my recent decision to start a new URL may help this as I switch over to the new site.

I will have to get my act together and work on the promotion of my website(s)!