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I, David McFarlane, dislike the BBC intensely - I think this comes from having a big pile of bullshit delivered, courtesy of their news and current affairs output, on a fairly regular basis.

On Monday night, their consumer rights programme Watchdog had a piece on Internet shopping and the dangers associated with it. To try and highlight how easy it is to scam people, they decided to create a website that sells gifts at competitive prices (such a wonderful use of taxpayers money, don’t you think?).

Allegedly it only costs £60 to set up a site like theirs, but if you believe that then I’m afraid you have as much intelligence as Jade Goody after twelve pints. Many companies would gladly charge you upwards of £800 for such a site (which reminds me - if Watchdog want somebody to look into, how about those idiots who "create" websites for around £2,000?), so to suggest this would cost the average punter £60 is frankly rubbish.

Now the whole point of doing this was to show how easy it is to scam people on the Internet, but not once did we hear anything about how to avoid encountering such sites in the first place. In fact there were only two people intereviewed that had been victims, along with an "Internet expert" (quite how he got this title, I don’t know) - not exactly a crisis, is it?

The cherry on top of the bullshit pie is that while Watchdog harp on about deceptive online practices, they admit that they intentionally falsified domain registrant information - which is in breach of the domain registration terms of service. Well done.

The BBC continuously spout out crap that is just simply not true - another example is a piece they did on Panorama about Wi-Fi connections being harmful to children. Without any actual evidence, they decided to carry out some "experiments" to try and work out if children would be affected by radiation coming from the connections - radiation was used multiple times, when in fact you get the same amount of radiation from a light as you do from a Wi-Fi connection. Of course, these "experiements" found that the danger risk is quite high (when it’s actually probably more dangerous to go to the toilet in the dark).

The BBC employs morons and presents lazy journalism as fact - the sooner we stop paying for this rubbish, the better.

Although it still has one redeeming feature I suppose - Charlie Brooker.

I don’t generally post about internet related shenanigans, but I’ll make an exception in this case. Because certain people might get upset and threaten to sue your good friend David McFarlane, this is only my opinion - make up your own mind and remember that I’m not a lawyer (although my brother has a law degree, which is useful).

Clickbooth are an affiliate network - this means that they have a bunch of offers that people can promote and get paid for when certain requirements are met.

Unfortunately, Clickbooth have a very nasty habit - they don’t seem to like paying their affiliates when they have a good month (basically, you make them a ton of money and in reply they give you bugger all).

On the gay affiliate forum WickedFire, a representative of said company posted one guy’s entire earning statistics. This is obviously a very major breach of privacy guidelines, as it’s the equivalent of your boss showing everybody else in your company your paycheck. This happened some 2 months after he was supposed to get paid, and he is (allegedly) not the only one.

The owner of WickedFire asked Clickbooth to apologise to this poor chap, but in response John Lemp (the owner of Clickbooth) demanded that all the posts in the thread were deleted and that Eli (of BlueHatSEO fame) be removed as a moderator as he edited out the information about the guy mentioned above’s statistics.

The hilarity begins here, when Mr Lemp sends two Cease And Desist  orders to WickedFire to get any offending threads removed from the forum. Jon (the owner of the forum) responds by posting said orders for everyone to see.

The result of this is that Jon is now being sued for emotional distress. Yes, a grown man got upset at some people on a forum criticising his company and through all his toys out of his pram.

Once the aforementioned Cease And Desist orders appeared, some people decided to blog about the whole situation. And what did Mr Lemp do about it? He sent them orders as well.

One blogger had to remove his post as he is a college student and can’t afford deal with lawsuit threats, which is an obvious case of cyber bullying - coming from someone suffering from "emotional distress", this seems more than a little hypocritical.

You really can’t do things like this, especially on the Internet. Can you imagine if somebody like Google started bullying people into not having a go at them? Or Digg? Or MySpace? Or Facebook? I’m sure that if any of them pulled this kind of stunt that users would leave faster than last night’s curry.

The moral of the story is this - if you are an affiliate company you should always pay your affiliates, keep private information private, don’t use bully boy tactics and apologise when you’ve done something wrong. If you do these four simple things (in any business, I suppose) then people will be more than happy to work with you in the future.

As for ShoeMoney (if you don’t know who he is, count yourself lucky) seemingly getting involved in this, it doesn’t surprise me one bit - that guy will do anything for some more publicity for his make money online blog. It’s just a pity that he can’t keep his ugly peanut head out of something that has absolutely nothing to do with him.

But I forgot, Clickbooth are sponsoring his crapfest - nothing like a good old-fashioned circle jerk on the Internets, is there Jeremy?

It’s only taken about three months or so, but I’ve finally hit number one in Google for David McFarlane!

No more bothering about the bloke in Australia who sells houses or the musician in Canada, or even the guy who plays for Dumbarton - good times.

Anyway, putting my ego to one side, I thought I’d prattle on about the darker side of the Internet. I’m not talking about 4chan or any hacking sites, but rather the "get rich quick" scumbags that pollute the atmosphere like a fart in church.

If you’ve never seen the whole "make $1,000,000 while you sleep" crap, count yourself lucky - the unfortunate thing is that so many people fall for it. It’s quite a sad fact that some people would rather buy into this shit than actually work for their money. It’s even sadder that the only ones who make any real money from this are the folk selling the garbage in the first place.

It’s confused me for a while why nobody does anything about it. Surely it breaks some law somewhere (if not here in the UK, possibly in the US) but if it doesn’t, it must! To fool people into believing that you don’t have to do any work to make money is just plain stupid.

If you ever have the misfortune to click onto one of these sites, click off straight away - it’s 100% bullshit.

I’ll leave you with a video that makes me laugh a lot, only because the guy getting slated is one of these douchebags.

Toodles.

There’s so many social networking places around, it got me to thinking - when will this end?

I mean, there’s only so many profiles you can manage at any one time (in fact, I can imagine that more work would probably be done by people if they spent less time on such sites) before you get bored - or at least that’s the case with me.

OK, I could very well be in the minority but you have to ask yourself what you’re actually getting out of these places.

Otherwise it’s just a waste of time.

Twitter is a waste of time.

If I wanted to get in contact with someone, could I not just phone them?

I had a quick look at some of the folk using it - they’re either following 100 odd other "twitters" or have 100 odd following them.

Have you people not got anything better to do with your time?

Christ.

Howdy folks.

Sometimes people on the Internet do wacky things that they think are hilarious, but really they’re not. Gizmodo (a tech blog thinymajig) have stepped over the line of common decency with this little stunt, in my opinion.

Yes it’s funny if you pull this shit off when you’re in a classroom or at home, but when people are spending boatloads of cash on showing their wares and some punk blogger comes along to fuck up their presentation you’re overstepping the mark - people’s jobs are on the line when you do this crap.

John Biggs at CrunchGear (who use to run Gizmodo) sums it up well by pointing out that most of their bloggers are kids.

Loren Feldman at 1938 Media basically says what I think is true about this event - it’s not cool in any way at all.

Don’t fuck with people’s livelihoods.

Facebook is pants - there I’ve said it.

Not just from a user’s point of view (far too much fannying around with applications), but from an advertising perspective as well.

Put simply, when Facebook started their own advertising network the potential for something as interesting as the beginning of Google AdWords was flushed completely down the toilet. Yes they have a very good targeting system, but the conversion absolutely sucks!

Also, what’s the point in the gift buying thing?

If I wanted to buy someone a drink, why in my right mind would I buy them a virtual one THAT THEY CAN’T EVEN DRINK?!?

The mind boggles!

In other news, Dunfermline have appointed Jim McIntyre as their manager on a permanent basis (giving him a two year contract, which could be considered a bit of a risk) - all I can say is good luck Jim, you can’t do any worse than Stephen Kenny!

I’m now back into the swing of things after the festive period, when it’s nice to take a few days off and just chillax a little bit.

Anyway, must be off - things to do, countries to conquer.

Cheerio.