ESQUERITA TAUGHT ME ALL ABOUT THE VOOLA

Good morning, children. Here is yr music history lesson for today:

Before there was Little Richard, there was Esquerita.



As you can see, he not only helped invent teh rockinrolls, he also invented Awesome Rock Hair.

All of which is an excuse to post that album cover and this video of belly dancers dancing to “Esquerita and the Voola”.

Yay Internets!

Shake it all around,

This is dF

HOW TO MAKE MONEY IN BLOGGING

Whilst the bridal unit and I were traipsing about the US, one “new” thing we picked up on was all the TV commercials and billboard signs for Cash4Gold. You know: send us yr gold stuff and we’ll send you cash at market value, etc.

When KT saw this for the first time, she looked at me and said: “Who in their right mind would send something valuable by mail to someone who promises to send them back money?”

To which I replied: “Welcome to America, honey.”

But she had a point, and of course I did wonder. I assumed they couldn’t be COMPLETELY crooked, because you could only sucker so many people before word got around that you might as well take yr gold and dump it in the river as give it to Cash4Gold. On the other hand, I seriously doubted that they would pay customers market value for their gold.

Sure enough, someone with a blog checked it out. He sent in $180 worth of gold and got a check for $60. He called Customer Service and got it raised to $178.

It gets better. The blog post on Cockeyed.com got picked up by much-more-widely-read Consumerist.com. A week later, the article’s author, Rob Cockerham, gets this email:

I work on the Cash4Gold site. We are trying to clean up their first page of results in Google. Your article: http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/goldkit/cheat.shtml is ranking very well for term “Cash4Gold”. The site looks like you may do well from Adsense.

Is there a financial arrangement we can come to that will offset your Adsense income and make it worth your while to take down or at least “de-optimize” it for that phrase? I would be happy to speak more about this on the phone…

Thanks,

Joe Laratro
President
Tandem Interactive - Trendy Online Marketing Solutions
Hollywood, FL 33020

In other words: yr article is ranking too high on Google where people can see it, so we’ll happily pay you money to either delete the article or the words “Cash4Gold” so it doesn’t show up so high in Google’s search ranking.

Rob didn’t respond, and two weeks later got a second email with a more specific offer of “a few thousand”. To his credit, he refused.

Note that the email came from a marketing company that has Cash4Gold as a "reputation management" client, not Cash4Gold itself, so it’s possible they don’t know what Joe Laratro is up to.  They may even denounce him now that BoingBoing has picked up the story. Laratro himself has responded to the story on his own blog – and while he glosses over the specifics of bribing someone to delete a story, he otherwise stands by the emails he sent. Apparently he thinks that using his real name and offering to give the bribe money to charity makes his tactics for “reputation management” acceptable.

Developing ...

Solid gold,

This is dF

LOOK KIDS, IT'S SQUIRTING BATMAN!

I realize that it’s first thing in the morning for some of you, and you may not be fully awake yet.

Allow me to help with this truly f***ed up Batman water pistol.



See, and you thought this post was unsettling.

Anyway, that’s what I get for fooling around on No Smoking In The Skull Cave late at night.

Wet wet wet,

This is dF