Fink About It

See, I’ve tried Twitter for a while now. And I still find it terribly annoying. It’s not a tool that works for me, because in 140 characters I cannot say what I want to say. Also it doesn’t help me spreading my content, if people still have to jump through tiny links. Also, I don’t like to click links, when I don’t know where I am ending up – I might even say this is how phishing works.
Read on

As you know, I like games. Therefore I inform myself about the latest and upcoming games. Now, where do I do that? For one, I have subscribed to an (offline) game magazine. And for another thing, I watch trailers online at websites like G4TV¹, Gamestar and I used to drop by at Gametrailers.com. What they all have in common, is annoying me with their in-between-video-advertisements.

When you want to watch a video, you watch it and it’s all fine. But as you want to watch a second video on the very same website, you have a 97 per cent chance to encounter an advertisement, before you can watch what you actually wanted to see. And there is no way of skipping the stupid ad!! The frame of the video² penetrates the whole website and overrules all other codes thereon. As a result, the background blacks out, giving you no chance of clicking anything except for the close button on your browser window. Read on

1. which is quite informative although it has a strong focus on console games [↩]
2. mostly done per flash [↩]

They come in the night, while you are sleeping. They take away the most precious in your blog: Your content. It’s the content thieves who are not finking about the work you’ve had to do in blogging so far.

Oh, My God! What The Fink Happened?

Recently I’ve been a victim to content theft. Most of my posts were taken and republished on another blog, along with the pictures in them that were simply hotlinked. So not only wasn’t my content uniquely attributed to me anymore, but the thief also rewarded me by stealing my bandwith.

The Problem

Apparently, a lot of people out there think that everything that you find in the net is free to use and to share. If you’re one of them, which I hope not, then you are a moron and should get a smacked bottom by whoever is sitting next to you. Everything that has been put in the net by someone, is protected by copyright. I know that YouTube and all other videoportals don’t exactly help making that point clear, since videos are pushed on the darn thing faster than the admins can check on them and say: “Don’t do it! This is not yours. Did you ask for permission?” Most common for image theft is Googles image search. There is no indication which pictures are free to use and which are not. And it is also lacking a warning¹. Read on

1. The information about copyright is so hard to find, I even had too google the page. [↩]

There are several things that I don’t like:

• hot rooms
• melted ice-cream
• long loading times
• and when people think you are stupid!

The latter is worst. One of the examples are websites where you can choose your language like this:

Please choose your language / Bitte wählen Sie Ihre Sprache:

German                                         Deutsch

When you give people a choice there should be at least some difference, right? Now let’s look at what I found recently: Read on

There are a lot of sites out there, that kindly ask you to give them money. These are sites that have advertisements all over the place. As their ads don’t make them as rich as they expected they ask you for your money in exchange to their poor content. Interesting, isn’t it?

Ian Fernando points out that this is often done with a blog plugin, that -in his words- uses “Neuro Linguistic Programming Strategy“. Instead of asking directly for money they want you to buy them a beer or a coffee. Even Ramon questions what you donate for. When people need money to run their blog, I suggests they host them at some free blog provider like blogger or wordpress.

Anyhow, this annoys me as much as twittering! Read on