It's been a long education
But my homework is done
I'm 'bout to rock the nation
And I'm gonna' have... FUN
      Sammy Hagar (from the Montrose album)

So what have I learned? Quite a bit about website search rankings and guerrilla marketing. The way to move up the ladder and get into relevancy in google is to have lots of sites link to yours. Otherwise you end up on page 26, i.e. in the noise. I thought I had been accomplishing this through lots of gratutitous links to my store web pages, (which still need a lot of work). That gets me on the map, but it has failed to move me up the ladder. The reason is that I've been going through a domain pointing service, and old-timers here see that in the URL bar as a dotted IP address. There are all kinds of links to 'sonicamusica.com', but once you get there, it's 'xx.xx.xx.xx/sonicamusica.com' where 'x' is a dotted IP address. Google and friends don't recognize that as the same place that was linked to, so all the benefits of guerrilla marketing are lost.

So it's time to dump the dotted IP and domain pointing and make full use of the Domain Name System (DNS). 

Seems like the more I try to get away from working with software every day, the more it keeps coming back. My cash register PC (where I handle band rentals) crashed the other day. Had to replace it - my first new version of Windows since about 2001. Got all of that configured. I still have to fix this blog generator to handle a gazillion entries. That's on the 2-do list.

 

And then it turns out that things have been happening in the e-mail and messaging world since I left it a few years ago. I recall in 1996 when myself and the email marketing director at Netscape called in Microsoft, AOL and sendmail for a round table discussion. We can stop email forgery, we told them. Stop it dead. But in order for it to work, everybody has to buy into it. Everybody has to do it. They all laughed and went their seperate ways when the meeting concluded. Now fast forward to 2005. Microsoft has advanced a notion called SPF. We can stop email forgery, they say. But in order for it to work, everybody has to buy into it. The difference between then and now is nine years and about sixteen trillion spam messages. Nobody is buying into the Microsoft version (except of course Microsoft). But they're finally buying into the idea. And it's grabbing hold. Just like mailbox 'views', it's nice to see something where I once was a lonely pioneer (or if I can be bold enough to use the term visionary) finally make it into the mainstream. It took about ten years for that one as well. Interesting timing because just two weeks ago I was the victim of a spam attack. Somebody sent out the typical 'cheap software' spam with a return address that pointed to my business email address. I got hate mail and bounces from all over the planet.

 

The other folks driving 'sender ID' are the banks. That's the real reason it's absolutely going to be adopted this time around. They've finally gotten fed up with 'phishing' scams. How many emails have you gotten from SunTrust and Citibank telling you that you have to login and change your password? And of course you're sent to the official bank web page, which if you look real close, ends up being a dotted IP address or some official looking website somewhere in the Bahamas.