I joined Twitter and tweeted several times but, considering it now, Twitter is a complete joke. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard others say, “I just don’t get it.” You know what, I just don’t get it either. If you are a celebrity of some sorts then it makes some sense. Perhaps the problem is that everyone thinks they are a celebrity.

Anyhow, I’ve started this column to link to stories talking about the demise of Twitter. It’s coming.

From cnn.com – Twitter users not so social afterall

As celebrities and millions joined Twitter, Criminals followed

Twitter is full of criminals and celebrities

Only 21% of Twitter members are active

Popularity: 9% [?]

For many of you who are not aware, Payloadz is a company that provides delivery of electronic documents like software and ebooks via download links submitted through emails. When a customer comes to your website and purchases your software or ebook product, you are left with the dilemma of how to deliver that product to the customer. Generally, in our “I want it yesterday” world of transactions, the seller will have less problems and satisfied customers if he or she can deliver that product asap. This is where Payloadz theoretically steps in.

Payloadz receives notice of the payment/purchase and generates an email to the buyer with a download link for the purchased product. Payloadz also copies the seller on the email and, for that matter, makes it appear that the email was generated by the seller as well.

Theoretically, this all happens very quickly. Having been with Payloadz for several years, I have experienced more than a few periods where Payloadz has failed to provide that product retrieval email. I’ve also experienced significant delays from the time of purchase until receipt of the product retrieval email. Of course, my emails concerning this went unanswered by Payloadz, and Payloadz never provided me with any credit for the downtime/lag time.

Nevertheless, I stayed with Payloadz despite their lousy customer service. I had been using it for quite some time and it worked okay.

Payloadz works on a monthly subscription basis. Every month on a certain day, Payloadz receives a subscription payment from paypal for their services. I believe that this is taken out at the beginning of the month so theoretically a customer should have a month of uninterrupted service following the subscription payment.

I decided to remove a bank account from my paypal account. Soon after doing this, I received an email from Payloadz:

“Our records show that you recently downgrade the Premium level of your account. Your new sales limit is $50. To change your level at any time, visit https://www.payloadz.com/account/acct_levels.asp.”

I soon realized that I had removed the bank account to which my payloadz subscription was tied. Having done so, I had unwittingly eliminated my payloadz services.

Of course, this should be a minor setback that would be quickly overcome. All I needed to do was renew my payloadz subscription. However, things had changed. No longer would my monthly subscription be $70. Now, according to Payloadz, it would be $100 a month. An almost 50% hike. On top of that, they terminated their services for my products effective that same evening. That evening was January 14 and I had paid up to and including February 7.

I contacted payloadz and indicated that I had not intended on canceling my services with them. I received the following:

Dear User,

Your transaction limit is 50$ and you used 967.00$. so please upgrade your account at premium level III (access level 4). in this you will get 600$ transaction level.

If any issue let me know.

Thanks
Asha Negi
Payloadz Tech

WOW, Jannon had apparently hired tech support! Or somebody had. Perhaps the company had been sold as this seemed out of character for Jannon.

After getting over the initial shock of such a step, I responded that this was ridiculous as I had paid through February 7. Reactivate my account for at least that period of time!

Payloadz tech support responded:

Dear user,

We are sorry for last email.yes we got your payment of 70$ on 8 January 2010. now when you will upgrade, from 8 January to upgradation date, we will deduct that used amount and we will partial amount you will get back.
As you know your account has been suspended by paypal.
We can help you in this way. Now your account is active for one day so that you are able to get your all sales.Please upgrade your account at premium level IV for appropriate access
here is detail of different levels.

https://www.payloadz.com/account/acct_levels.asp?upgrade=1

If any issue again then please let me know.

Regards
Asha Negi
Payloadz Tech Team

What am I doing? Negotiating with terrorists? Why do I feel like I’m being held hostage? Or that my account and products are being held hostage? I paid for three more weeks and NOT just one more day. What a joke!

At this point (or probably earlier), I decided FUCK Payloadz. This meant changing all my “BUY NOW” buttons. In the meantime, I miss a sale and get the following email from Paysuckz:

Dear Seller,
A potential customer has accessed your purchase link in an attempt to initiate a purchase for the item listed above. Unfortunately, your PayLoadz Account is offline due to exceeding the Transaction Limit. This prevents customers from completing the purchase process. To restore account access and enable sales to your account.
Either enable this action by upgrading to Account Level PayLoadz Premium Account IV for $100 at:

http://www.payloadz.com/account/go?l=5&uid=34600

OR login to your account at https://www.payloadz.com.

Thank you for being a valued seller on our service.

Sincerely,
PayLoadz Support Team
support@payloadz.com
www.payloadz.com/help

Great! First Payloadz robz me of almost $70, continued service, and now I’ve lost a sale. It became even more pressing to change all my “BUY NOW” buttons. This was no slight task as I have between 60-70 buttons for several dozen products and combinations of those products.

I tried to log into my account at Payloadz.com in order to get access to my products (which had been uploaded to their servers). Payloadz had blocked my access to my own products. It’s a good thing that I have copies of all my products on my computer and elsewhere. It would have been easier to get to them via Payloadz. Realizing that I was much smarter than Jannon, I back-doored my way into Payloadz to get easy access to MY products.

My backdoor access only lasted a couple more days, but I’m happy to report that I only lost one product in the end. I was able to change all my “Buy Now” buttons which amounted to about 120 or so, and I ended up going with Linklok in order to handle my product delivery.

Linklok has a one time license fee of $30 per domain. If you have already bought one license, future licenses are only $14.95 each. My buddy recommended DLGuard but this was well after I had completed the transition. I also found ejunkie after the fact as well. E-junkie charges by the number of products that you have to sell and not by the transaction or bandwidth amount. E-junkie could have handled my product delivery for about $12 a month instead of $70 or $100. With companies like E-junkie around, I wonder how payloadz stays in business.

I did get another email from payloadz:

PLDZ tech team, Jan 15 02:43 am (EST):

Dear user,

We are sorry for last email.yes we got your payment of 70$ on 8 January 2010. now when you will upgrade, from 8 January to upgradation date, we will deduct that used amount and we will partial amount you will get back.
As you know your account has been suspended by paypal.
We can help you in this way. Now your account is active for one day so that you are able to get your all sales.Please upgrade your account at premium level IV for appropriate access
here is detail of different levels.

https://www.payloadz.com/account/acct_levels.asp?upgrade=1

If any issue again then please let me know.

Regards
Asha Negi
Payloadz Tech Team

I ended up filing two disputes against Payloadz with Paypal. The first was for ending my subscription prematurely. The second was for their service being down for 5-6 days in December. Payloadz refunded both months which surprised me. I used the proceeds to invest in Linklok and wave goodbye to Payloadz forever.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Here’s a dirty little paypal trick. You go to pay for your ebay item that you just “won,” and you change the payment method to credit card. If you then try to send a message to the seller (as part of the payment), paypal switches your payment method back to bank account from credit card. If you don’t catch it, you end up paying from your bank account.

Paypal sucks!

Popularity: 45% [?]

I recently discovered another site stealing my content and photos and posting them without my permission. When I contacted the site owner, he seemed offended that I would complain and indicated that he was doing me a favor by “linking” to me.

A link is not a hyperlink followed by 2-3 paragraphs of my content and then one of my photos. As on of my friends said, “If you are going to link to another site, just put up a link.” Don’t steal a bunch of content and photos in the process.

I asked him to cease and desist this practice which he begrudgingly did after trying to point out all the flaws in my site that somehow allowed him to steal my content (more on that later). So how do you deal with these idiots who must have grown up during the period of the internet where mp3’s and software were traded for the price of a mouse click?

You can notify Google of the copyright infringer through the process that they have outlined online. If the website belongs to any of Google’s numerous services, they can be banned from those services for violating Google’s Terms of Service. Popular program include Google Adsense. Other companies with affiliate programs may have similar Terms of Service that prohibit the use of copyrighted material without permission.

You can contact the website owner and request that the material be removed.

You can contact the website owner and ask that they pay for or reimburse you in some manner for using your material without your permission.

Of course, how do you find out that someone is violating your copyright? This website article expresses an idea that I had – using Google Alerts to notify you of copyright infringers and scrapers. It also has a great explanation of how scrapers and copyright infringers can hurt your search engine ranking for using your material on their site. It also has a good link explaining how to report copyright violators to their ISP and potentially having their site shut down for good.

Future post: “If a copier’s use supplants demand for the original work, then it will be very difficult for him or her to claim fair use. On the other hand, if the use does not compete with the original, for example because it is a parody, criticism, or news report, it is more likely to be permitted as “fair use.”" – The Fair Use Defense

Popularity: 46% [?]

A reader recently asked how to add a video to an ebook. I’m sure that there are many ways of going about this but I think the simplest way would be to put the video on a website and have a link to the video within the ebook.

If your ebook is in pdf format, you can make clickable links within your ebook using Adobe Acrobat Professional. I would make sure to put the text that is clickable in a different color (perhaps a shade of blue) and indicate to the reader that they can see the video if they click on the blue text (assuming that they are viewing the ebook on a computer or on another device that would allow access to the web).

Adding links within your ebook is a great way to enhance your product’s value to the customer. It’s also any easy way to update the ebook. I like to add links within an ebook to keep past customers returning to my website. For example, if I go into more detail on a topic at the website, I refer the ebook reader to the website with a link.

Another great way to use links is to add more content to the ebook. I sell a guide to the eviction process. From within the ebook, I link to several forms in Microsoft Word format that the reader may require. Instead of having to deliver the ebook along with several forms in multiple downloads, I simply link to all the forms from within the ebook.

As you can see, adding links to other material on the web can significantly enhance the value of your ebook.

Popularity: 54% [?]

Dear Amazon Honor System member:

Beginning December 11, 2008, the Amazon Honor System will be discontinued. This means that PayBoxes on member websites and PayPages on Amazon.com will no longer function.

Amazon Honor System members should make plans now to remove Honor System PayBoxes from their websites. This can be done by simply removing the HTML code originally provided for PayBoxes from your page code document.

We will provide access to disbursement information through December 30, 2008, to allow all transactions to be settled. After that date, Amazon Honor System account pages will be removed from the Amazon.com website. We urge members to create file copies of necessary financial information before account pages are removed.

The Amazon Honor System has served an important function for members and for Amazon.com since its inception in Fall 2001. The Honor System has also been central to Amazon’s larger efforts to assist disaster relief agencies such as the American Red Cross. Although we are discontinuing the current Honor System framework we intend to continue our support for charitable giving with new technologies.

To investigate alternative Amazon technologies that may benefit your organization, please see the following pages:
…click here to read more →

Popularity: 50% [?]

Wordpress has released yet another update. Ain’t life grand if you are someone with several blogs. By my count, it is Wordpress 42nd release/update. What’s inside 2.6.2? This is a security update so it’s a critical one. Everyone should update their blog to 2.6.2:

If you allow open registration on your blog, you should definitely upgrade. With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password. The randomly generated password is not disclosed to the attacker, so this problem by itself is annoying but not a security exploit. However, this attack coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand() could be used to predict the randomly generated password. Stefan Esser will release details of the complete attack shortly. The attack is difficult to accomplish, but its mere possibility means we recommend upgrading to 2.6.2.

You can download Wordpress 2.6.2 here.

Popularity: 55% [?]

I was looking for Paypal alternatives because you never know when Paypal is going to get a wild hair up its arse and freeze your account. In such a situation, it would be nice to have a second payment acceptance service on board so you could just sever the ties with Paypal at that point. I came across 2checkout.com and gave that the once over. It looked like a good deal until I checked out their fees.
…click here to read more →

Popularity: 54% [?]

Dear Counselor,

A few months ago I recently sold off my web design firm in
Kirkland, Washington and in doing so I discovered that I own the
domain name columbustriallawyer.com.

I have owned it for years now and I think that when I was running
my design firm we developed a large website for a firm in
Columbus who had stiffed us on the bill.

That was years ago and now that my design firm has sold I no
longer need the name and have decided to let it go.
…click here to read more →

Popularity: 65% [?]

I was performing some site maintenance this morning and went to my blog at finishbasement.net. When I tried to load the page in my browser, nothing – just a blank page. I was a little concerned but not too much. These hackers couldn’t do anything that I couldn’t undo in short order. I logged into the site via my ftp application and began to go through the files.

First order of business – I decided to replace all the Wordpress 2.5.1 files with a fresh set. I basically just followed my instructions on updating a Wordpress blog. This didn’t work but when I viewed the code at my home page (which was still coming up blank), I remarked that there was considerably less code than before. So something had partially worked.

I began looking through the files on my website through the ftp application.
…click here to read more →

Popularity: 78% [?]