[SpamCop-List] Re: The message is not spam because......

[Joris Van Damme]

> I do that all the time.  I usually start with a target and google -- but
> then I get links which lead to links etc.  I've been doing it for years
> and do it just about every day.  My last 'venture' started with a recent
> article about 'The Lost City' and the 'surfing trip' took me all around
> to old year 2000 websites and the Univ. of Washington's oceanography
> dept..

OK, I'll except that.

Most people I know react surprised to the question, didn't actually 'surf'
for years and hadn't noticed they had lost the habit until I asked the
question. The difference in your experience and mine, I'm not sure why that
is, but maybe it's related to the subjects of interest. I can see that the
particular subject you mention likely points to 'newer' websites, whilst
most of my subject likely points me to the 'older'.

This little 'poll' of mine is backed up by my own logs. I have a huge site
on xxx. I've got very good incoming links from like *the* two other places
on xxx, and aside from us three, there's not a lot xxx around. You'd expect
these good incoming links account for most of my traffic, right? Wrong, from
my apache logs, I'm consistently reading Google is at least ten times as
important when it comes to directing traffic my way. I've got no other
explanation then that even in my profession the 'surfing' user is dead, and
turned to google hit-and-run tactics instead because of bad browsing
experience.

You will admit though, I think that you need lots of filth blocking
technology? Pop-up and pop-under blockers for one, perhaps also FireFox
tweeking to not let links open in secondary windows/tabs, perhaps plug-ins
to eliminate the linking nature of dead links, and/or to mark PDF links
properly as PDF links, etc? I'd be interested in seeing a list, perhaps
there's a thing or two I can still do to improve my own surfin' experience.

> > Thus, 'the information', in the sense of the 'Great Library of all
> > Mankind' that we once dreamt about, it's defenetly lost.
>
> I wouldn't say that.

I would hope not. I took a point of view, you've quoted it, but I would hope
it was a bit extreme, which served the purpose of getting a message accross.

And I've found myself an actual old-time 'surfer', so not all is lost. ;-)

Later, you wrote:
> but the
> reality is that there is a 'massive' condtion of the web that web
> developers aren't competent to make compliant webpages.  Their
> competence is barely limited to noncompliant IE.

Seems we at least agree on that.

There's a FireFox plug-in that always checks the page you're viewing, and
real-time adds a little validation check result icon in the status bar.
Possibly you may find it useful. It seems to be called 'HTML Validator
(based on Tidy)' which is kinda surprising, because it's a HTML validator, I
think it's based on Tidy. ;-)


Joris